Go Tell it on the Mountain
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  • Published: 9 November 2022
  • ISBN: 9781841593715
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 280
  • RRP: $45.00

Go Tell it on the Mountain

Formats & editions
Paperback
9 Jan 2002
EBook
9 Jan 2002
Audiobook
6 Jun 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: $45.00
Categories:

Also by James Baldwin

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