Go Tell It on the Mountain

Mountain, Baldwin said, is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else. Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boys discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwins rendering of his protagonists spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

Additional ISBNs: 9780345806543, 0345806549, 9780345806550, 0345806557