Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin

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 , originally 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 one Saturday in March of 1935 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 toward self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.