James Baldwin: Public Intellectual

Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain, based in part on James Baldwin's childhood in Harlem. With a potent combination of lyrical compassion and resonant rage, he portrays fourteen-year-old John Grimes, the stepson of a fire-breathing and abusive Pentecostal preacher in Harlem during the Depression. The action of this short novel spans a single day in John's life, and yet manages to encompass on an epic scale his family's troubled past and his own inchoate longings for the future, set against a shining vision of a city where he both does and does not belong.

Set in the contemporary Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. James Baldwin's brilliant narrative delves into the mystery of loving with a sharp, probing imagination, and he creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the heart.

This novel looks into sexual, racial, political, and artistic passions. It is set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France. "Brilliant and fiercely told."--The New York Times One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years. Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, Blacks and Whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.

This novel is composed of eight short stories, “The Rockpile,” “The Outing,” “The Man Child,” “Previous Condition,” “Sonny’s Blues,” “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” “Come Out the Wilderness,” and “Going to Meet the Man.” The stories follow the everyday lives of Black men and women from the 1930s-50s, addressing themes of racism, sexuality, drug addiction, and lynching.

No other novel of our time strikes so close to the heart of the dilemma of the Black artist in America that this controversial, gripping portrait of a successful actor explosively confronting his angers, his shames, his past, and his passions. From its moving description of a boy growing up in Harlem to its frankly erotic scenes of love that shattered society's conventions, this is a narrative that cries out for social change and hits with hammer blows of truth at the conscience of a nation.

In this honest and stunning novel, James Baldwin has given America a moving story of love in the face of injustice. Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned.

The novel tells the life story of a group of friends, from preaching in Harlem, through to experiencing "incest, war, poverty, the civil-rights struggle, as well as wealth and love and fame—in Korea, Africa, Birmingham, New York City, Paris."