Go Tell It On The Mountain: growing up Black, poor and gay in 1930s New York

Go Tell It On The Mountain is one of the great incendiary debuts of the 20th Century. Published in 1953, James Baldwin’s autobiographical novel follows a fictionalised avatar of his younger self as he navigates his way through an ordinary day in 1930s Harlem. Baldwin showed readers life as he knew it as a black, working-class gay teenager in a racist society.

Baldwin disliked what he called ‘protest’ novels. His interests ranged from classic white writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James to many of the giants of Harlem Renaissance, like Countee Cullen and Richard Wright. He counted Miles Davis and Toni Morrison amongst his friends, but also Norman Mailer and ultimate playboy Hugh Hefner. To write a book about New York, he ultimately needed to leave America - first to Paris, then to a Swiss village, where he - against a backdrop of Alpine hills and the tinkling of cowbells - he brought it to a close.

Go Tell It On the Mountain was respected on publication, but hardly sold like hotcakes. Sophie and Jonty ask why it is that Baldwin, who wrote his greatest works in the 1950s and 1960s, and died in 1987, has become only more relevant in the last decade, with intellectuals, novelists and film-makers adapting or responding to his work.

Content warning: discussion of violence, domestic abuse, racism; mention of rape.

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Further Reading and Watching:

James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, (Penguin, 2002 edition, first pub. 1953)

James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” in Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Classics 2015)

David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography, (Skyhorse, 2015)

Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting: American Encounters, (New York Review of Books Classics, 2024)

Colm Tóibín, On James Baldwin (Brandeis University Press, 2024)

Eddie Glaude, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, (Crown, 2020)

New Yorker article about Baldwin and Richard Avedon’s collaboration Nothing Personal: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/13/richard-avedon-and-james-baldwins-joint-examination-of-american-identity

Barry Jenkins’s film adaptation of “If Beale Street Could Talk”

Raoul Peck’s documentary “I Am Not Your Negro”

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