BOOK 'GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN'

Publisher: Vintage International Penguin Random House

Originally published in 1953, 'Go Tell It on the Mountain' is James Baldwin's first major work, partly inspired by his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological frankness, resonant symbolic power and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells of a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the pastor of a Pentecostal church in Harlem. Baldwin's depiction of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual and moral struggle to reinvent himself opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.