The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group's reading of Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying. We hope that they will provide you with multiple ways of looking at--and talking about--a novel whose eloquence, thematic richness, and moral resonance have called forth comparisons to the work of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and William Faulkner. In a story so simple that it might be a lost parable from the Gospels, Gaines has compressed the entire bitter history of black people in the South--and, by extension, in America as a whole.This majestic, moving novel is an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives.- Chicago TribuneA Lesson Before Dying reconfirms Ernest J. Gaines's position as an important American writer.- Boston GlobeEnormously moving... Gaines unerringly evokes the place and time about which he writes.-aLos Angeles TimesErnest J. Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Paris