num_pages: 290
description: "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 boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the son of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
language: English
title: Go Tell It on the Mountain
titlecomplete: Go Tell It on the Mountain
genres: Literature, American, Classics, Literary Fiction, African American, Novels, Religion, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Race
ratings_count: 65546
places: New York City, New York
publisher: Modern Library