Go Tell It on the Mountain

First published in 1953, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain is a deeply personal novel of faith, family and the struggle to claim one’s own identity. Set in Harlem in 1935, it follows fourteen-year-old John Grimes, the stepson of a formidable Pentecostal preacher, on the day of his spiritual reckoning at a storefront church; as the congregation gathers in prayer, the lives and histories of John’s family emerge through memories of migration, racial injustice, religious devotion and buried pain. Baldwin moves between the boy’s interior awakening and the troubled pasts of his father Gabriel, his mother Elizabeth and his aunt Florence, revealing how inherited wounds shape the possibilities of love and freedom.

Drawing on the rhythms of Black American religious life and the cadences of biblical language, Baldwin transforms the conventions of the coming-of-age novel into a searching examination of belief, sexuality, shame and redemption. The book announced the arrival of a major literary voice, establishing themes that would recur throughout Baldwin’s work: the burden of history, the complexities of family, and the necessity of confronting the self without illusion. Both an intimate portrait of Harlem and a powerful reckoning with the promises and costs of religious faith, Go Tell It on the Mountain remains a defining work of twentieth-century American literature.

From the book

“I guess you’d better pray,” he said, “if you want to get to heaven.”

— James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

On Go Tell It on the Mountain

“A remarkable novel.”

— The New York Times