Friday, February 17, 2023

Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin


Started: 2/15/2023

Finished: 2/16/2023

Year: 1952

Pages: 291

Genre: literature

Grade: B

Reason for reading: library book, Levar Burton's book club read

Type: hardcover

Blurb (from Amazon): "'Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.' 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."

Opinion: Wasn't sure what to expect when reading this...just knew that it was a classic. Probably fitting for the time that it was written. 

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