Go Tell It On The Mountain. by Baldwin, James - 1953

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953. First edition of Baldwin's first book. Octavo, original cloth. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket drawing by John O'Hara Cosgrave. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box made by Asprey. An exceptional example, easily one of the nicest copies extant. Go Tell It on the Mountain Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." It was 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. "With vivid imagery, with lavish attention to details, Mr. Baldwin has told his feverish story" (The New York Times). Listed on Modern Library's 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century.