Go Tell It on the Mountain

James Baldwin s bestselling first novel a coming-of-age story that depicts incredible resilience in pursuit of self-invention, now hailed as an American classic

A novel of extraordinary sensitivity and poetry. Chicago Tribune

Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin s first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage born of compassion, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin s rendering of a young person s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.