A Study Guide for James Baldwin's "Go Tell It on the Mountain"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for James Baldwin's "Go Tell It on the Mountain," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535823975

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Go Tell It on the Mountain

James Baldwin

1953

Introduction

James Baldwin was one of the most versatile and influential artists of the post-World War II generation, creating memorable short stories, novels, plays, essays and children's books. Go Tell It on the Mountain was his first published novel, and many critics feel that it is has stood as his best. It is a traditional bildungsroman, a novel tracing the psychological and spiritual development of its central character, John Grimes.

In the first chapter, John's family life, ruled by anger, poverty and guilt, is explored, leading to the fifth chapter, when, after night's religious service, John is accepted into his church's community because he has undergone a seizure-like conversion, writhing on the floor and speaking in foreign tongues. The middle chapters give the background stories of his aunt, his father, and his mother, who migrated to New York from the South and endured various difficulties that are reflected in John's life.

There is a strong autobiographical aspect to the novel, as many of the details in John's life mirror those in Baldwin's life, including his impoverished upbringing in Harlem, his angry vitriolic father, his fascination with an older male church member and his religious conversion at age fourteen. Explaining how writing his first novel helped him come to terms with the troubled he faced growing up, Baldwin said, "Mountain was the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."

Author Biography

James Baldwin was born in 1924 in Harlem, New York City. Many of the details in the life of John, the main character in Go Tell It on the Mountain, parallel facts in Baldwin's own life. He was an awkward, gangly boy who suffered the abuse of his stepfather, a laborer and storefront preacher who had moved to New York from New Orleans. In contrast to the squalor and anger that he experienced at home, Baldwin was a resounding success at Public School 24 and at Frederick Douglass Junior High School, where his teachers recognized his brilliance and verbal skills. At age fourteen, he, like John, experienced a religious conversion during the service at his church, the Mount Calvary of the Pentecostal Faith Church.

After that, Baldwin became a preacher himself, and throughout high school he addressed the congregation at the local storefront church at least once each week. After high school he worked briefly in New Jersey, and then moved to Greenwich Village, the section of New York City that was a famous gathering place for artists. For five years he worked menial jobs and published short pieces in intellectual magazines such as The Nation, The Partisan Review, The New Leader, and Commentary.

With the help of famed African-American author Richard Wright, Baldwin received the Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust Award for financial help while writing his first novel. In November 1948 he sailed to France, and he never lived in America again, although he traveled here frequently on speaking engagements. He felt that America was too socially oppressive, both