Go Tell It on the Mountain
In one of the greatest American classics, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity. 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 one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."
Stats for nerds
5recommend
7mentions
6people
2016–2026years
86% recommend14% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I am in (perhaps) a tiny minority in that I love American literature but just don’t get what the fuss is about The Great Gatsby. I just don’t think it’s that good a novel. Off the top of my head I could come up with a list of at least 10 American novels that I have read that I think are significantly superior.
In no order here goes
1. Blood meridian
2. The Bell Jar
3. Of Mice and Men
4. Mason and Dixon (everyone’s gonna say “Gravity’s Rainbow” but I think since this is an explicitly American list, the themes of Mason and Dixon of the North/South divide etc put it more squarely on this list)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird
6. Moby Dick (I’m not the biggest fan of this actually but it’s way better than Gatsby for me)
7. Walden (Does this count? Anyway whatever. Walden)
8. Portrait of a Lady
9. Infinite Jest
10. Go tell it on the mountain
Honestly this is right off the top of my head and looking back I haven’t even got any Hemingway on here, or Ralph Ellison, or Toni Morrison. I could make a case for Slaughterhouse 5 or Catch-22 or The Naked and the Dead or a bunch of other things. Like even though I think he’s a total tool, Bonfire of the Vanities probably has a good case for being on the list
I just genuinely don’t get the fuss about Gatsby. I’m glad people like it, but there seem far, far better American novels.
Edit to add: And yes I did read it. Twice in fact, once in my late teens after I had read a lot of serious literature and thought it was ok but not great and then again in my late 30s because I was sure I must have missed something and was very disappointed to come to the conclusion that I really hadn’t.
I have two theories for why maybe people like it so much. Firstly, because the author is such a stylist and they get strung along by some of the prose. But when you read a truly jawdropping stylist like for example in my book Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Cormac Macarthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald really doesn’t stand well in that company.
Second theory (perhaps cynical) is that it’s the first novel in the US school syllabus that gets really serious literary criticism applied to it and so for a lot of people it is the book that awakens them to the power of literature. I could totally see that if you had a really great teacher introducing you to proper literature by means of the book you might love the experience and, because of that, the book.
- You can know almost all you need to know about this article from this sentence:
> This is even more true today, when the intersectional grid draws rigid lines between “oppressor” and “oppressed” that Baldwin, despite the animus against white America that ballooned as he aged, was far too subtle a thinker to accept.
If you think that the inline definition of "intersectional" is an accurate one, the rest of the essay follows. You may or may not learn anything, though if this prompts you to read "Go Tell It on the Mountain", that would be a great outcome.
If you actually know anything about theory, then you'll see the rest of the essay as rhetorical shadow-boxing with something no one is actually saying.
- If a book isn't taken out of the shelves for two-three years, I would be very surprised it stays there. Where I worked, it would have been sent to the reserve, and only be out for some events (for our 'burned books' week we had 'all is quiet on the western front' in multiple languages, including German, and other book burned by Fascisti and nazis, and that's how I discovered this masterpiece).
I highly doubt school libraries function any differently. Every year you receive a magazine with books who received prizes/recommendations, you move older books that aren't read to the reserve and command new ones. In my country, you especially have the 'highschooler prize' (not sure how to translate it), which is voted upon by students from 50 different highschool accross the country, and the winners are always recommended by the magazine.
My advice would be, rather than preventing librarians to do their job, maybe write better books? Prevent new commands rather than remove already existing books? Because putting 'Go Tell It on the Mountain' on the shelves isn't ideology, just good taste. Removing it is.
What really grind my gear is that I would bet censors don't read or review books. Book reviewing was a staple of my curriculum from 11 to 16, so I imagine it isn't hard. Censors should have to write at least a book review a year, graded (not to prevent them to censor, just publish the grade so we could see their reading level).
- Go tell it on the mountain, it was his first book and lays the foundation for everything he did later. Amazing book
- I think I've given "Go Tell It On The Mountain" by James Baldwin more times than any other book.
- I recently read my first two Baldwin books (Go Tell It On The Mountain and The Fire Next Time) and in both cases I was blown away by the completeness of his treatment of racism at a time when black people were fighting for much more basic civil rights.
I also recently read some of the popular modern books about race in America (Between The World and Me, The New Jim Crow, etc) and I found Baldwin just as essential to understanding the world in 2016. Particularly with 'The Fire Next Time', I felt the book achieved its goals perfectly.
