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).

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, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. 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.