TEHRAN – “A Lesson Before Dying” by novelist Ernest J. Gaines has been published by Naqshe Jahan in Persian.

Originally published in 1993, the book has been translated into Persian by Seyyed Reza Ebrahimi.

“A Lesson Before Dying” is set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shootout in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. 

Grant Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university, has returned to the plantation school to teach. 

As he struggles with his decision whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt and Jefferson’s godmother persuade him to visit Jefferson in his cell and impart his learning and his pride to Jefferson before his death. 

In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting and defying expectations. 

Gaines brings to this novel the same rich sense of place, the same deep understanding of the human psyche, and the same compassion for people and their struggle that have informed his previous, highly praised works of fiction.

Ernest James Gaines was also a short story writer and teacher. Born to a sharecropping family, he was picking cotton in the fields by age nine and only attended school five or six months a year. 

When he was fifteen, he moved to California to join his mother and stepfather, because his Louisiana parish had no high school for African Americans. 

It was in California that he began writing. He attended San Francisco State University, served in the army, and won a writing fellowship at Stanford University. 

Gaines was a MacArthur Foundation fellow, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, awarded the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts, and inducted into the French Order of Arts and Letters as a Chevalier.

Photo: Cover of the Persian edition of novelist Ernest J. Gaines’s “A Lesson Before Dying”.

MMS/YAW