Go Tell It on the Mountain - Hardcover

James Baldwin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841593710 ISBN 13: 9781841593715

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 2016

Synopsis

''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.

About this title

About the Author

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was educated in New York. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, received excellent reviews and was immediately recognized as establishing a profound and permanent new voice in American letters. The appearance of The Fire Next Time in 1963, just as the civil rights movement was exploding across the American South, galvanized the nation and continues to reverberate as perhaps the most prophetic and defining statement ever written of the continuing costs of Americans' refusal to face their own history. It became a national bestseller, and Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time. The next year, he was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and collaborated with the photographer Richard Avedon on Nothing Personal, a series of portraits of America intended as a eulogy for the slain Medger Evers. His other collaborations include A Rap on Race with Margaret Mead and A Dialogue with the poet-activist Nikki Giovanni. He also adapted Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X into One Day When I Was Lost. He was made a commander of the French Legion of Honor a year before his death, one honor among many he achieved in his life.

Review

"Something in his prose hit me, almost winding me with its intensity. I'd never read a novel that described loneliness and desire with such burning eloquence." -- Douglas Field * Guardian * "It broke my heart and made me want to jump up and down, unable to fully articulate my own response towards it ... [A] notion of a shared humanity consumed Baldwin, and infused everything he did and wrote. Deprived of heritage and history, he borrowed freely and created his own unique language, with the cadences of the Bible and of jazz and Negro spirituals, and inflections of James, Dickens and Shakespeare ... This should, like J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, have been crowned as the Great American Novel." -- Azar Nafisi * Independent * "A distinctive book, both realistic and brutal ... A novel of extraordinary poetry." * Chicago Tribune *

Edition details

• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1841593710
• ISBN 13: 9781841593715
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264