Go Tell It On The Mountain.

BALDWIN, James.

$40,000.00

Item Number: 125755

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953.

First edition of Baldwin’s first book. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by James Baldwin on the front free endpaper to his mother, “Mama from Rizzy from Jimmy – August 21st!” The recipient, Baldwin’s mother Emma Berdis Jones, left Baldwin’s biological father before moving to Harlem where Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924. When James was 3 years old, his mother married a Baptist preacher David Baldwin with whom she had eight children between 1927 and 1943. The family was poor, and Baldwin’s stepfather, to whom he referred in essays as his father, treated him more harshly than his other children. His intelligence, combined with the persecution he endured in his stepfather’s home, drove Baldwin to spend much of his time alone in libraries where he discovered his passion for writing at an early age. At the age of 13, he wrote his first article, titled “Harlem—Then and Now”, which was published in his school’s magazine, The Douglass Pilot. Baldwin and his mother remained close throughout his lifetime, she was an honorary guest at his 60th birthday celebration at UMass Amherst in August 1984. Near fine in a very good price-clipped dust jacket which has been restored and with the spine and front panel supplied in facsimile. Jacket drawing by John O’Hara Cosgrave. An exceptional association.

Go Tell It on the Mountain Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." It was first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. 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 vivid imagery, with lavish attention to details, Mr. Baldwin has told his feverish story" (The New York Times). Listed on Modern Library's 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century.