SOURCE: Lockhart, Leslie. Review of A Lesson before Dying, by Ernest J. Gaines. Black Scholar 25, no. 2 (spring 1995): 65-6.

In the following review, Lockhart summarizes A Lesson before Dying, highlighting the narrator's struggles to reconcile himself with his community and his fate.

A Lesson before Dying explores lost dignity and the often disconcerting links between the individual and the surrounding community. Gaines creates an austere story of Grant Wiggins, a frustrated rural school teacher and Jefferson, a young man, who is sentenced to death. The novel explores each man's effort to reconcile himself with his community and his fate. With a keen eye for the plagues and longings of the human spirit, Gaines raises questions whose answers are elusive.

The novel is set in the 1940s, in Bayonne, Louisiana, which is the backdrop for all of Gaines' fictional work. Young Jefferson shares a ride to a liquor store with...