Go Tell It on the Mountain, originally published in 1953, is James Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. This novel 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 lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem. This "truly extraordinary" novel (Chicago Sun-Times) opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.