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Go Tell it on the Mountain
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  • Published: 9 November 2022
  • ISBN: 9781841593715
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 280
  • RRP: $50.00

Go Tell it on the Mountain

Formats & editions
Paperback
9 Jan 2002
EBook
9 Jan 2002
Audiobook
6 June 2024
Hardback
9 Nov 2022
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The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition.

'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.
  • Published: 9 November 2022
  • ISBN: 9781841593715
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 280
  • RRP: $50.00
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About the author

James Baldwin

James Baldwin was born in 1924 in New York. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which evokes his experiences as a boy preacher in Harlem, was an immediate success. Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956) has become a landmark of gay literature and Another Country (1962) caused a literary sensation. His searing essay collections Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961) contain many of the works that made him an influential figure in the Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin published several other collections of non-fiction, including The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972). His short stories are collected in Going to Meet the Man (1965). His later works include the novels Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979).

James Baldwin won a number of literary fellowships: a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship and a Ford Foundation grant. He was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour in 1986. He died in 1987 in France

portrait photo of James Baldwin

Also by James Baldwin

The Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows My Name ; No Name In The Street; The Devil Finds Work
I Am Not Your Negro
Encounter on the Seine
No Name in the Street
The James Baldwin Collection
The Harlem Ghetto
Everybody's Protest Novel
See all

Praise for Go Tell it on the Mountain

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