The Southern Review, September 22nd, 2005
I WAS TEACHING AT THE University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette when I came up with the idea for A Lesson Before Dying. And that would be around 1983 or 1984, before that school's name was changed to University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Now, the original idea was that the story would occur in the early 1980s. I wrote a letter to the warden at Angola, the state prison here in Louisiana, informing him who I was--a teacher at USL and the author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and several other books--and explaining that I had another novel in mind about a prisoner on death ro...
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