A 
Lesson Before Dying
By Ernest J. Gaines
Oprah Book Club Selection #9, September 1997
Editorial Review:
In a small Cajun community in 1940s Louisiana, a young black man is about to go to the electric chair for murder. A white shopkeeper had died during a robbery gone bad; though the young man on trial had not been armed and had not pulled the trigger, in that time and place, there could be no doubt of the verdict or the penalty.
“I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be…” So begins Grant Wiggins, the narrator of Ernest J. Gaines’s powerful exploration of race, injustice, and resistance, A Lesson Before Dying. Continue reading »