Go Tell It on the Mountain

Go Tell It on the Mountain
Author: James Baldwin
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2013-09-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0375701877

In one of the greatest American classics, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." “With vivid imagery, with lavish attention to details ... [a] feverish story.” —The New York Times

James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain

James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain
Author: Carol E. Henderson
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2006
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780820481586

The publication of James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain ushered in a new age of the urban telling of a tale twice told yet rarely expressed in such vivid portraits. Go Tell It unveils the struggle of man with his God and that of man with himself. Baldwin's intense scrutiny of the spiritual and communal customs that serve as moral centers of the black community directs attention to the striking incongruities of religious fundamentalism and oppression. This book examines these multiple impulses, challenging the widely held convention that politics and religion do not mix.

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Go Tell It on the Mountain
Author: James Baldwin
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2013-09-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0345806557

One of the most brilliant and provocative American writers of the twentieth century chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention in this “truly extraordinary” novel (Chicago Sun-Times). Baldwin's classic novel opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."

New Essays on Go Tell It on the Mountain

New Essays on Go Tell It on the Mountain
Author: Trudier Harris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 174
Release: 1996-03-29
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780521498265

A collection of critical essays on James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain.

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Go Tell It on the Mountain
Author: James Baldwin
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2016-03-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101907614

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

James Baldwin’s "Go Tell It on the Mountain" - a religious approach

James Baldwin’s
Author: Martin Arndt
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 22
Release: 2004-10-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3638312054

Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject Theology - Miscellaneous, grade: good, University of Leipzig, language: English, abstract: James Arthur Baldwin was born to Emma Berdis Jones and an unknown father on August 2, 1924, in New York City. The fact that he did not know about the identity of his biological father haunted him all his life. Who was to become Baldwin’s stepfather was a laborer and Pentecostal preacher who came - as part of the Great Migration - to New York in 1919 “seeking better social conditions and economic opportunities.” (Kenan 1994: 26) After he married her, he began to preach in storefront churches and made a living of a job he had in a bottle factory on Long Island, and although he “worked steadily, until encroaching age and illness prohibited it”, were his wages seldom high enough to feed his big family2, especially during the Great Depression. (Kenan: 27) As described in “Notes of a Native Son” this situation had contributed to his father’s “intolerable bitterness of spirit.”(Kenan: 88) It was “unrelieved bitterness and anger” that “drove [his father] away permanently in 1932.” (Kenan: 27) James was very much influenced and shaped by his stepfather, and the problems that derived from his relationship to him became in my eyes a powerful motor for his poetry writings and determined his future decisions. To his father the young boys intelligence and his interest in books was but a source of danger, for “the Bible was the only book worth reading.” (Kenan: 29) If it wasn’t for Orilla “Bill” Miller, a white woman from the Midwest who stepped up against his fathers objections, and for Gertrude Ayer, a black principal who encouraged the young boy to write stories, plays and poems, James would have been deprived of a valuable education, because in the Baldwin household “education was suspect as a tool of the white devils not particularly useful to black men in a racist society that placed so many checks on their ambition.” (Kenan: 31) James Baldwin was brought up “in a household atmosphere of strict, even suffocating, religiosity” (Kenan: 32) and his father lived “like a prophet, in such unimaginably close communion with the Lord, that his long silence which were punctuated by moans and hallelujahs and snatches of old songs while he sat at the living room window never seemed strange to us.” (Baldwin 1984: 89)

"Who Set You Flowin'?"

Author: Farah Jasmine Griffin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 1996-09-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0195358449

Twentieth-century America has witnessed the most widespread and sustained movement of African-Americans from the South to urban centers in the North. Who Set You Flowin'? examines the impact of this dislocation and urbanization, identifying the resulting Migration Narratives as a major genre in African-American cultural production. Griffin takes an interdisciplinary approach with readings of several literary texts, migrant correspondence, painting, photography, rap music, blues, and rhythm and blues. From these various sources Griffin isolates the tropes of Ancestor, Stranger, and Safe Space, which, though common to all Migration Narratives, vary in their portrayal. She argues that the emergence of a dominant portrayal of these tropes is the product of the historical and political moment, often challenged by alternative portrayals in other texts or artistic forms, as well as intra-textually. Richard Wright's bleak, yet cosmopolitan portraits were countered by Dorothy West's longing for Black Southern communities. Ralph Ellison, while continuing Wright's vision, reexamined the significance of Black Southern culture. Griffin concludes with Toni Morrison embracing the South "as a site of African-American history and culture," "a place to be redeemed."

James Baldwin

James Baldwin
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2007
Genre: African American authors
ISBN: 0791093654

A collection of essays presenting critiques and analysis of the major works of the African American author.

Re-viewing James Baldwin

Re-viewing James Baldwin
Author: Daniel Quentin Miller
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2000
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9781566397377

This new collection of essays presents a critical reappraisal of James Baldwin's work, looking beyond the commercial and critical success of some of Baldwin's early writings such as Go Tell it on the Mountain and Notes of a Native Son. Focusing on Baldwin's critically undervalued early works and the virtually neglected later ones, the contributors illuminate little-known aspects of this daring author's work and highlight his accomplishments as an experimental writer. Attentive to his innovations in style and form, Things Not Seen reveals an author who continually challenged cultural norms and tackled matters of social justice, sexuality, and racial identity. As volume editor D. Quentin Miller notes, "what has been lost is a complete portrait of [Baldwin's] tremendously rich intellectual journey that illustrates the direction of African-American thought and culture in the late twentieth century." This is an important book for anyone interested in Baldwin's work. It will engage readers interested in literature and African-American Studies. Author note: D. Quentin Miller is Assistant Professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College, Saint Peter, MN.