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.