Annotation
"Mountain," Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. 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 storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. 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.
Characters
| Name | Grimes, John |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Student |
| Trait | African American |
| Name | Gabriel |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Minister |
| Traits | Remarried |
| Stepfather | |
| African American | |
| Abusive | |
| Name | Elizabeth |
| Gender | Female |
| Traits | Married |
| Mother | |
| African American | |
| Name | Roy |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Student |
| Trait | African American |
| Name | Florence |
| Gender | Female |
| Traits | African American |
| Widow | |
| Genre | Fiction Domestic Classic Religious |
| Topics | African Americans African American families Spiritual awakening Great Depression Stepfamilies Visions Resentment Family relationships Ministers Identity Redemption Abusive relationships Infidelity Love affairs |
| Setting | New York |