13. A Lesson Before Dying

In this novel, loosely based on the life of Willie Francis, a young Black man twice sentenced to the electric chair, author Ernest J. Gaines poses the question - Knowing we're going to die, how should we live? It's the story of an uneducated young black man named Jefferson, accused of the murder of a white storekeeper, and Grant Wiggins, a college-educated native son of Louisiana, who teaches at a plantation school. These two men, named for presidents, discover a friendship that transforms at least two lives.

Gains was born into a sharecropper family on a plantation in Pointe Coupe Parish, Louisiana. His upbringing would become the backdrop for several of his later works, including 'A Lesson Before Dying'. An award-winning author, Gaines served as the Writer-in-Residence at the University of Louisiana Lafayette for nearly twenty years and also taught a creative writing class at the University of Rennes in France.