SOURCE: Wardi, Anissa Janine. Review of A Lesson before Dying, by Ernest J. Gaines. MELUS 21, no. 2 (summer 1996): 192-94.

In the following review, Wardi focuses on the relationship between Wiggins and Jefferson in A Lesson before Dying, assessing the characters's personal transformations and the significance of literacy in accomplishing that task.

Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson before Dying is his eighth work of fiction and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle award. The novel, set in the fictional town of Bayonne, Louisiana in the late 1940s, tells the story of a young African American man, Jefferson, who is falsely accused of conspiring to rob a liquor store and murder the white store owner. The narrative reveals that Jefferson was in the wrong place at the wrong time, having taken a ride from the actual killers just prior to the murder. Because these men were themselves shot and...