"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Baldwin lays down the terrible symmetries of these two blighted lives as the ironic context for John's dark night of the soul. When day dawns, John believes himself saved, but his creator makes it clear that this salvation arises as much from blindness as revelation: "He was filled with a joy, a joy unspeakable, whose roots, though he would not trace them on this new day of his life, were nourished by the wellspring of a despair not yet discovered."
Though it was hailed at publication for its groundbreaking use of black idiom, what is most striking about Go Tell It on the Mountain today is its structure and its scope. In peeling back the layers of these damaged lives, Baldwin dramatizes the story of the great black migration from rural South to urban North. "Behind them was the darkness," Baldwin writes of Gabriel and Elizabeth's lost generation, "nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire--a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!" This is Baldwin's music--a music in which rhapsody is rooted anguish--and there is none finer in American literature. --David Laskin
"The most important novel written about the American Negro," says Commentary. "It is written with poetic intensity and great narrative skill," writes Harper's. Saturday Review praises it as "masterful," and the San Francisco Chronicle declares that this important American novel is "brutal, objective and compassionate."
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Seller Inventory # 9781101907610
Book Description Condition: New. Brand New! Not Overstocks or Low Quality Book Club Editions! Direct From the Publisher! We're not a giant, faceless warehouse organization! We're a small town bookstore that loves books and loves it's customers! Buy from Lakeside Books!. Seller Inventory # OTF-Y-9781101907610
Book Description Hardback or Cased Book. Condition: New. Go Tell It on the Mountain 0.85. Book. Seller Inventory # BBS-9781101907610
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Hardcover. From one of the great American writers of the twentieth centurya coming-of-age story about a fourteen-year-old boy questioning the terms of his identity, the racism he faces, and the double-edged role of religion in his life. With an Introduction by Edwidge Danticat, award-winning author of Everything Inside.Vivid imagery lavish attention to details [A] feverish story. The New York TimesOriginally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountainbased in part on James Baldwins childhood in Harlemwas his first major work. 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 Johns life, and yet manages to encompass on an epic scale his familys 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. Baldwins story illuminates the racism his characters face as well as the double-edged role religion plays in their lives, both oppressive and inspirational. In prose that mingles gritty vernacular cadences with exalted biblical rhythms, Baldwins rendering of his young protagonists struggle to invent himself pioneered new possibilities in American language and literature. Originally published in 1953, this is "a hardcover edition of James Baldwin's classic coming-of-age novel set in Harlem in the 1930s, with a new introduction by Edwidge Danticat"-- Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781101907610
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # DADAX1101907614
Book Description Condition: New. Buy with confidence! Book is in new, never-used condition. Seller Inventory # bk1101907614xvz189zvxnew