Go Tell It on the Mountain

Go Tell It on the Mountain by Baldwin, James. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780385334570.

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.