Go Tell IT On the Mountain (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics S.) - Softcover

Baldwin, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140184503 ISBN 13: 9780140184501

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1991

Synopsis

This haunting coming-of-age story, based in part on James Baldwin's childhood in Harlem, is an American classic. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was Baldwin's first major work. With a potent combination of lyrical compassion and resonant rage, he portrays a fourteen-year-old boy questioning the terms of his identity. John Grimes is the stepson of a fire-breathing and abusive Pentecostal preacher in Harlem during the Depression. The action of this short novel spans a single day in John's life, and yet manages to encompass on an epic scale his family's troubled past and his own inchoate longings for the future, set against a shining vision of a city where he both does and does not belong. Baldwin's story illuminates the racism his characters face as well as the double-edged role religion plays in their lives, both oppressive and inspirational. In prose that mingles gritty vernacular cadences with exalted biblical rhythms, Baldwin's rendering of his young protagonist's struggle to invent himself pioneered new possibilities in American language and literature. Introduction by Edwidge Danticat

About this title

Review:

"With vivid imagery, with lavish attention to details, Mr. Baldwin has told his feverish story." --The New York Times

"Brutal, objective and compassionate." --San Francisco Chronicle

"It is written with poetic intensity and great narrative skill." --Harper's

"Strong and powerful." --Commonweal

"A sense of reality and vitality that is truly extraordinary. . . . He knows Harlem, his people, and the language they use." --Chicago Sun-Times

"This is a distinctive book, both realistic and brutal, but a novel of extraordinary sensitivity and poetry." --Chicago Sunday Tribune

From the Back Cover:

'I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal with my father.'

Drawing on James Baldwin's own boyhood in a religious community in 1930s Harlem, his first novel tells the story of young Johnny Grimes. Johnny is destined to become a preacher like his father, Gabriel, at the Temple of the Fire Baptized, where the church swells with song and it is as if 'the Holy Ghost were riding on the air'. But he feels only scalding hatred for Gabriel, whose fear and fanaticism lead him to abuse his family. Johnny vows that, for him, things will be different. This blazing tale is full of passion and guilt, of secret sinners and prayers singing on the wind.

'A beautiful, enduring, spirtual song of a novel' Andrew O'Hagan

'With vivid imagery, with lavish attention to details, Mr. Baldwin has told his feverish story' The New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0140184503
• ISBN 13: 9780140184501
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256