Go Tell It on the Mountain

About this book

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time "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 Baldwins 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.