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 towards self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.