Collegeboard recommended New York Times

Go Tell It on the Mountain

by James Baldwin
Book Image

Details

Pages
240
Word Count
80384
Lexile
1030L
AR
6.5
Grade Level
G7 - G8
Genre
Autobiograhpical Novel

Summary

James Baldwin's haunting coming-of-age story, with a new introduction by Roxane Gay. 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 toward self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.

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