Go Tell It on the Mountain (Paperback)by James Baldwin... Description: Dell/Laurel Edition, 1985. Softcover, 221pp... Condition: Good Condition. Binding tight with light reading creases to outer spine but no cracks to binding. Binding slightly 'cocked', but solid. No writing/marking observed in text. Tanning to pages. Cover has moderate...
Go Tell It on the Mountain (Paperback)
by James Baldwin
Description: Dell/Laurel Edition, 1985. Softcover, 221pp.
Condition: Good Condition. Binding tight with light reading creases to outer spine but no cracks to binding. Binding slightly 'cocked', but solid. No writing/marking observed in text. Tanning to pages. Cover has moderate overall wear with a bit of mild aging/soiling. (See my photo/scan)
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
First published in 1953 when James Baldwin was nearly 30, Go Tell It on the Mountain is a young man's novel, as tightly coiled as a new spring, yet tempered by a maturing man's confidence and empathy. It's not a long book, and its action spans but a single day--yet the author packs in enough emotion, detail, and intimate revelation to make his story feel like a mid-20th-century epic. Using as a frame the spiritual and moral awakening of 14-year-old John Grimes during a Saturday night service in a Harlem storefront church, Baldwin lays bare the secrets of a tormented black family during the depression. John's parents, praying beside him, both wrestle with the ghosts of their sinful pasts--Gabriel, a preacher of towering hypocrisy, fathered an illegitimate child during his first marriage down South and refused to recognize his doomed bastard son; Elizabeth fell in love with a charming, free-spirited young man, followed him to New York, became pregnant with his son, and lost him before she could reveal her condition.
Baldwin lays down the terrible symmetries of these two blighted lives as the ironic context for John's dark night of the soul. When day dawns, John believes himself saved, but his creator makes it clear that this salvation arises as much from blindness as revelation: "He was filled with a joy, a joy unspeakable, whose roots, though he would not trace them on this new day of his life, were nourished by the wellspring of a despair not yet discovered."
Though it was hailed at publication for its groundbreaking use of black idiom, what is most striking about Go Tell It on the Mountain today is its structure and its scope. In peeling back the layers of these damaged lives, Baldwin dramatizes the story of the great black migration from rural South to urban North. "Behind them was the darkness," Baldwin writes of Gabriel and Elizabeth's lost generation, "nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire--a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!" This is Baldwin's music--a music in which rhapsody is rooted anguish--and there is none finer in American literature. --David Laskin
Review
Semiautobiographical novel by James Baldwin, published in 1953. Based on the author's experiences as a teenaged preacher in a small revivalist church, the novel describes two days and a long night in the life of the Grimes family, particularly the 14-year-old John and his stepfather Gabriel. It is a classic of contemporary African-American literature. Baldwin's description of John's descent into the depths of his young soul was hailed as brilliant, as was his exploration of Gabriel's complex sorrows. The novel teems with biblical references. Though the novel is in part about the position of blacks in American society, some critics felt that Baldwin inadequately addressed racial issues; the novelist, however, said he made a deliberate attempt to break out of the "cage" of black writing. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Product Description
James Baldwin's stunning first novel is now an American classic. With startling realism that brings Harlem and the black experience vividly to life, this is a work that touches the heart with emotion while it stimulates the mind with its narrative style, symbolism, and excoriating vision of racism in America. Moving through time from the rural South to the northern ghetto, starkly contrasting the attitudes of two generations of an embattles family, Go Tell It On The Mountain is an unsurpassed portrayal of human beings caught up in a dramatic struggle and of a society confronting inevitable change.
"The most important novel written about the American Negro," says Commentary. "It is written with poetic intensity and great narrative skill," writes Harper's. Saturday Review praises it as "masterful," and the San Francisco Chronicle declares that this important American novel is "brutal, objective and compassionate."
From the Publisher
James Baldwin's stunning first novel is now an American classic. With startling realism that brings Harlem and the black experience vividly to life, this is a work that touches the heart with emotion while it stimulates the mind with its narrative style, symbolism, and excoriating vision of racism in America. Moving through time from the rural South to the northern ghetto, starkly contrasting the attitudes of two generations of an embattles family, Go Tell It On The Mountain is an unsurpassed portrayal of human beings caught up in a dramatic struggle and of a society confronting inevitable change.
"The most important novel written about the American Negro," says Commentary. "It is written with poetic intensity and great narrative skill," writes Harper's. Saturday Review praises it as "masterful," and the San Francisco Chronicle declares that this important American novel is "brutal, objective and compassionate."
From the Inside Flap
James Baldwin's stunning first novel is now an American classic. With startling realism that brings Harlem and the black experience vividly to life, this is a work that touches the heart with emotion while it stimulates the mind with its narrative style, symbolism, and excoriating vision of racism in America. Moving through time from the rural South to the northern ghetto, starkly contrasting the attitudes of two generations of an embattles family, Go Tell It On The Mountain is an unsurpassed portrayal of human beings caught up in a dramatic struggle and of a society confronting inevitable change.
"The most important novel written about the American Negro," says Commentary. "It is written with poetic intensity and great narrative skill," writes Harper's. Saturday Review praises it as "masterful," and the San Francisco Chronicle declares that this important American novel is "brutal, objective and compassionate."
From the Back Cover
"Baldwin's way of seeing, his clarity, precision, and eloquence are unique....He manages to be concrete, particular...Yet also transcendent, arching above the immediacy of an occasion or crisis. He speaks as great black gospel music speaks, through metaphor, parable, rhythm."
--John Edgar Wideman
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, and educated in New York. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews and immediately was recognized as establishing a profound and permanent new voice in American letters. "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else," he remarked. Baldwin's play The Amen Corner was first performed at Howard University in 1955 (it was staged commercially in the 1960s), and his acclaimed collection of essays Notes of a Native Son, was published the same year. A second collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, was published in 1961 between his novels Giovanni's Room (1956) and Another Country (1961).
The appearance of The Fire Next Time in 1963, just as the civil rights movement was exploding across the American South, galvanized the nation and continues to reverberate as perhaps the most prophetic and defining statement ever written of the continuing costs of Americans' refusal to face their own history. It became a national bestseller, and Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time magazine. Critic Irving Howe said that The Fire Next Time achieved "heights of passionate exhortation unmatched in modern American writing." In 1964 Blues for Mister Charlie, his play based on the murder of a young black man in Mississippi, was produced by the Actors Studio in New York. That same year, Baldwin was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and collaborated with the photographer Richard Avedon on Nothing Personal, a series of portraits of America intended as a eulogy for the slain Medger Evers. A collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man, was published in 1965, and in 1968, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, his last novel of the 1960s appeared.
In the 1970s he wrote two more collections of essays and cultural criticism: No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976). He produced two novels: the bestselling If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979) and also a children's book Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976). He collaborated with Margaret Mead on A Rap on Race (1971) and with the poet-activist Nikki Giovanni on A Dialogue (1973). He also adapted Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X into One Day When I Was Lost.
In the remaining years of his life, Baldwin produced a volume of poetry, Jimmy's Blues (1983), and a final collection of essays, The Price of the Ticket. Baldwin's last work, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), was prompted by a series of child murders in Atlanta. Baldwin was made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor in June 1986. Among the other awards he received are a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Partisan Review fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant.
James Baldwin died at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in France on December 1, 1987.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
Sweeter the Second Time Around, March 9, 2002
By Dera R Williams (Oakland, CA United States) - See all my reviews
This was my second time reading this masterpiece;the first time in the early 70s. I don't remember what I thought about it then, though I remember it leaving an impression. The writing then and moreso now is writing at its best from a master in my opinion. Yes it is complex, convoluted, disturbing at times but for me it flowed. Not everyone can write fire and brimstone, sin and redemption in literary terms. I am in awe of his genius.
During one night at a prayer service, four individuals stories are told. John, on this day has just turned fourteen years old and is trying to make sense of his life. Gentle, intelligent, he wanted so much to please the man who he thought of as his father. He had potential to expand his life beyond the limitations in front of him. Gabriel, wretched, tortured soul, a man who refused to take responsibility for his actions. Saved, sanctified and fill with the Holy Ghost, his mistreatment of his first wife, Deborah, his discard lover, Esther, his present wife Elizabeth and his son John is what kept him from being the minister that he was in his youth before he fell from grace. Elizabeth, proud and determined, she wanted John to have the same love from Gabriel that he gave to his other "natural" sons. A woman who accepted her circumstances; she has lost her first true love, Richard and was resigned to accepting Gabriel's hand in marriage to redeem her sin. Florence, too proud for her own good Bitter, resentful of her brother Gabriel and now perhaps facing death, she has lived a live of unfulfilled dreams.
Where we they all stand after they haved poured their hearts and souls on the alter? Secrets, dreams, hopes are revealed. Told in a language of complexity full of allegories, symbolism, Bible similies, it is no wonder it is taught in universities around the country. I am on a quest to read re-read Baldwin's books that I have read and read others that I have not. Nobody does it better.
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
Black church affects Black community, for better and worse, August 21, 2002
By Melanie N. Lee "mnl_1221" (Corona, New York United States) - See all my reviews
Jesus said, "A man's enemies will be the members of his own household" (Matthew 10:36), and "No prophet is accepted in his hometown" (Luke 4:24).
This idea certainly plays out in the Grimes family of James Baldwin's "Go Tell It on the Mountain" (1952). Except for John's mother Elizabeth, the adult Grimeses have no idea that love, familial love, is supposed to include favor (not favoritism like the father Gabriel's), the idea of blessing each other with good words, good will, and heartfelt affection. Unfortunately, the novel's Black Christians' idea of goodness and holiness is colored by the master's idea of a good slave: docile, acquiescent, submissive, silent in the face of abuse, always needing to prove your worth. "Blessed Assurance" isn't one of their songs.
"Go Tell" presents not only the story of John's 14th birthday, but the past stories of Elizabeth, Gabriel, and Aunt Florence. Whereas Gabriel's spiritual journey--if you can call it that--at about age 21 is born of desperation and remorse after much self-abuse and self-indulgence, John's spiritual journey on his 14th birthday is one of insight and refuge after much abuse and neglect. Gabriel indulges and denies his dark side, projecting his evil onto others. John wonders over his own evil thoughts, seeking to reconcile his light and dark sides.
John's family and people have been cursed by the white-oriented world, and by a false interpretation of the scripture, namely the curse of Noah upon Canaan. Believing this curse, Gabriel in turn, without meaning to, curses his children. Will any of the Grimes family truly experience being, like Israel, heirs to the promises of God, as well as heirs to the world's persecution and heartache?
John perceives that Gabriel, or some unacknowledged dark part of Gabriel, would rather see him damned than saved, would rather keep John as a bastard child, "son of the slave woman", as someone to look down upon--similar to the cutting attitude that Gabriel and his sister Florence have toward each other. However, John, born in New York City, a generation removed from Jim Crow, just might become the first person in his family to start to throw off the reproach of Egypt (see Joshua 5:9)--that is, of slavery. That is, if his anger and hatred don't overtake him first.
"Go Tell" is an excellent exploration of how the "Black church" has both upheld and held back African-Americans through slavery, Jim Crow, the Northern migration, and racism.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Baldwin's emotionally raw portrayal of "the tension between a particular father and a particular son", June 22, 2006
By D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Go Tell It on the Mountain (Paperback)
In many ways, "Go Tell It on the Mountain" is an act of exorcism, wrestling with the demons of an adolescent past. Baldwin's first novel examines his love-hate relationship with the religious traditions from his youth, tackles (albeit indirectly) his conflicted and nascent homosexuality, and (above all) struggles with his ambiguous feelings about his true-life stepfather, whom he detested while he was an adolescent and whom he tried to understand when he was an adult.
The narrative unfolds in a single 24-hour period (sunrise to sunrise), although flashbacks are scattered throughout to explore the backgrounds of the characters and, in particular, to describe their past wrongdoings. The opening and closing sections describe 14-year-old John Grimes and follow his family as they prepare for and then depart from a religious service. The middle core of the novel, consisting of three chapters, takes place in the neighborhood storefront church on Saturday night, a spiritual oasis in a cesspool of back-alley crime and lowlife iniquity.
These three chapters are the prayerful meditations of, respectively, John's no-nonsense aunt Florence, whose act of liberation from unappreciated familial duties early in life led her to the "freedom" of Harlem; his abusive father Gabriel, who lived a life of easy debauchery until he converted and became a Baptist minister; and John's mother Elizabeth, who is quiet and forbearing and who is beginning to comprehend the extent to which Gabriel has not lived up to the bargain of their marriage. Hovering in the background of this quarrelsome family is Elisha, a young leader at the church, to whom John is attracted both spiritually and, to John's vexation, physically ("in his heart, yearning tenderness for holy Elisha; desire, sharp and awful as a knife, to usurp the body of Elisha").
There's always the temptation to read too much biography in an autobiographical novel. Although the characters and events in "Go Tell It on the Mountain" are surely shrouded in a mask of fiction (for example, it does not appear that Baldwin ever knew learned the identity of his biological father), there are just as surely parallels with Baldwin's own life and family. His stepfather was also a Baptist minister whose animosity towards the young Baldwin was especially pronounced. As a teenager, Baldwin also underwent an intense religious awakening and became a minister for a Pentecostal assembly in Harlem. And, of course, Baldwin rather famously wrestled with his own sexuality. When the novel was initially published, he tried to downplay its autobiographical elements, but, reflecting on the novel three decades later, Baldwin admitted that it "comes out of the tension between a particular father and a particular son. No matter that he was not my biological father."
The only passages I thought cumbersome were those that detailed the sermons preached by Gabriel as he began his ministry as a young man. (The problem with such literary representations is that the best evangelical sermons depend largely on performance, delivery, and audience response--largely to mask the fact that they are inherently formulaic and often studded with cliches, repetition, and all-too-familiar biblical allusions.) Otherwise, the novel is very tightly written and emotionally raw, and it dynamically presents the paradox of human transgressions and moral rectitude, the complexity of a genuine conversion experience, and the ambiguity that remains in its immediate aftermath.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
I Would Give this 6 Stars If I Could [39][36][T], March 10, 2007
By Miami Bob "Resurgent Reading" (Miami, FL United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Go Tell It on the Mountain (Paperback)
Sometimes, when you finish a book, you look up and take a deep breath and say, "Wow." This is one such novel.
The descriptive and intricate prose is woven so tightly and consciously that Baldwin amazingly delivers prose masterfully without having to use complex language - this book will never send you to the dictionary. Some courtier designers need fine fabric to make quality attire. This designer can take rags and sew them into gowns with only his sewing skills - Baldwin is an artist of words.
Overlapping the life stories of John's mother (Elizabeth) and stepfather (Gabriel), together with Gabriel's alienated sister (Florence) against the backdrop of John's 14th birthday, reveals to us the soul and character of the individuals and how their torments and incredible journeys affect and play upon John's coming-of-age manhood rite - which in this case is an out-of-body experience/revelation to the Lord before the congregation at Gabriel's church.
John's 14th birthday will and should never be forgotten by he or the congregation. And, we readers, who are delivered into the secret realms of the tortured pasts of Elizabeth, Gabriel and Florence, can better appreciate and, in turn, should better remember the moment the young John emerges as a man.
In the end, as a less-than-religious person, I asked myself whether Baldwin's constant references to the Bible (the story of Noah and Ham plays a large part in the end in contrast to the tortured relationship between Gabriel and John) and religious revival experience of John are meant to employ others to follow their lead, or to dispel their self-proclaimed truths because of the contradictions between religion and the religious which we have been permitted to learn about in Gabriel and others. But, I would have to conclude that Baldwin leaves that decision to you - but allows you to make the decision knowingly or after having learned about how what Gabriel preaches is not synonymous with what Gabriel lives.
I would give this 6 stars if I could. Few books have touched me as much as this book has.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
descriptive or prescriptive?, February 18, 2005
By S. Singer (Pittsburgh, PA, USA) - See all my reviews
For me, the central problem of James Baldwin's beautiful and poetic account of growing up in a religious, African American family is the ending. The question is this: does Baldwin take this ending to be merely a description of what sometimes happens or is he implying this is what should happen?
Throughout the novel, religion is seen as a force that stagnates, lies to and weakens the characters. However, by the end, it has become a force that the main character thinks will help him get through all the trials he still must face. It hasn't solved anything. In fact, nothing has been solved at all. We've been merely given a view of all that's come before and how those past events will probably shape the future. For example, John still has to face his unloving step-father - even though he is still unaware that the man isn't his biological father. How knowing he was "saved" will help him is hard to imagine.
The most heart-breaking incident in the book is what happens to John's real father. Though pathos abounds in this book, that is the incident that truly hurts the most.
Throughout, the writing is poetic and precise. Baldwin certainly matured in works like "Giovanni's Room" and developed his themes of homosexuality - a thread hinted at here but left unresolved like all the book's themes.
The problem is just that we're left with so much unfinished. It's almost like Baldwin stopped writing the book in the middle. It seems he wants the import of John's religious experience to make everything else at least bearable. However, how this is to be accomplished in light of such darkness is hard to imagine or even if something else might be more desirable. Moreover, is Baldwin suggesting that all the negatives of religion he has been cataloguing throughout the book are somehow justified?
In any case, "Go Tell It on the Mountain" is a gorgeous book about very ugly things. Good luck sorting out that ending.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A True Landmark, September 14, 2001
By Kent Braithwaite (Palm Desert, CA) - See all my reviews
As an author with my debut novel in its initial release, I hope to one day write a book with the depth of James Baldwin's GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN. We all have dreams, and that dream is one of mine. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN is a multi-layered novel dealing with the African-American experience during and after the massive migration of African-Americans from the rural south to the urban north. He has fully fleshed-out characters, a sophisticated plot, and a narrative vocie perfectly suited to his subject matter. Seldom has a better book been written. If you haven't read this novel several times, get to work.
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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
his first and best novel, February 11, 2005
By Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews
I came to Baldwin through his essays, which are vivid, incisive, and full of raw emotion. By contrast, most of his novels are mediocre. Nonetheless, this novel is very good, a glimpse at a life that is utterly alien and beautifully, indeed brilliantely, captured.
It is the story of a struggling boy - very bright, caught in a culture and society that excludes him as a black. If you read this, you will understand how he feels and what he struggles for. That is what a good novel does, and this is very good.
Recommended with warmth.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Pretty Strong Stuff, April 23, 2004
By -_Tim_- (The Western Hemisphere) - See all my reviews
The members of the family in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain suffer because of their color, their poverty, and the conflicts and disappointments that are part of any life. Most of all they suffer because of the demands that their intense, dogmatic religion places on them. While they love and fear God, they have little appreciation for God's creation. For them, everyone and everything in this world is carnal and corrupt. They aspire to an otherworldly existence but their nature leads them to defy God and suffer terrible guilt. They think and speak in the language of fundamentalist Christian religion: "witness," "wandering," "wilderness," "wickedness." In James Baldwin's hands, this language is beautiful but it's disturbing, too, and this short novel will not be forgotten easily.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Remarkable Baldwin, February 22, 2007
By Jack M. Walter "Jack M. Walter" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
Go Tell It on the Mountain is James Baldwin at his best: fiery, passionate, tender and all-seeing. The novel is written so that three of the main characters get a chance to tell their own stories, which heightens the impact of the story of the boy John. There are many reasons why Baldwin is considered one of the greatest twentieth century American writers, and this is one of them.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Past Meets Present, February 5, 2005
By cielle (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews
I felt such a connection in reading this book. All the sayings and the scripture quotings reminded me so much of my childhood and growing up in church and of my elder family members. I felt at one with John's experience. I could totally relate. I am in awe of Baldwin's writing. The metaphores and symbolisms were well placed. Some of the scene transitions could have been a little more seamless. I found myself a couple of times back tracking to understand if I was in the past or present. Character development was to a T. This was a great read!
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100% Positive 