Go Tell It on the Mountain (Vintage International)
One of the most brilliant and provocative American writers of the twentieth century chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention in this "truly extraordinary" novel (Chicago Sun-Times).
Baldwin's classic novel opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."
Baldwin's classic novel opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."
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Community Reviews
Read this a few months ago. I loved how Baldwin introduced each of his characters and how he went into the back stories of all the major characters to reveal their thoughts and motives behind their actions. Most parts of the novel were beautifully written but some parts I did have a hard time following. It is always a good choice to sit down with some of Baldwin's writing.
Go Tell it on the Mountain is a book that at the surface can be perceived as insulting to the church. However, under the surface, the book explores the relationship between the status quo of the 1960s and of Black Americans. You see innocence and the redemption of those around a little boy become entangled in his fate.
There were times when I was reading this that I thought I didn’t like this book that much. It’s not an easy book. But I kept at it and finally it opened up. This is a classic among the classics.
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