A Lesson Before Dying

Set on a plantation outside Bayonne, Louisiana during the late

1940s, Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying is the eloquent account of

 one man’s struggle to come to terms with his own mortality and

 another man’s attempt to guide him in this process. The novel

 follows the relationship of Jefferson, a young black man wrongfully

 sentenced to die, and Grant, the plantation’s college-educated

 teacher who is reluctant to become involved despite the urging of

 his aunt and the African American community. As their relationship

 develops against a backdrop of racial segregation and injustice, each

 must confront what it takes to be a man in the face of the certainty

of death and the uncertainties of life.