A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines (Good, 1994, Pbk, 256 pgs, Vintage Books)

Cover has some wear; pages appear to be unmarked and are age-toned. ISBN 0375702709

A Lesson Before Dying is set in a small Louisiana Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young illiterate black man, is falsely convicted of murder and is sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, the plantation schoolteacher, agrees to talk with the condemned man. The disheartened Wiggins had once harbored dreams of escaping from his impoverished youth, yet he returned to his hometown after university, to teach children whose lives seemed as unpromising as Jefferson's. The two men forge a bond as they come to understand what it means to resist and defy one's fate.