a lifestyle blog for book lovers
Menu
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Baldwin was the son of a preacher and the grandson of an enslaved person, and his life experiences heavily inform this semi-autobiographical 1953 novel, which tells the story of one day in the life of a 14-year-old boy in Harlem in the late 1930s. The boy, John Grimes, struggles with hypocrisy in the Pentecostal church while also finding comfort in the community. Baldwin powerfully writes about John's spiritual and sexual awakening as a young, gay Black man and a person of faith.
About the Book
Publisher’s description:
‘Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.’ 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 that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, 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 his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual and moral struggle towards self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.
Other books in "20 coming of age novels"
Look Inside
