Go Tell It on the Mountain, his first novel, is a partially autobiographical account of his youth. Critics, however, note the impassioned cadences of Black churches are still evident in his writing. In the early 1940s, he transferred his faith from religion to literature. At age 14, Baldwin became a preacher at the small Fireside Pentecostal Church in Harlem. He was the eldest of nine children his stepfather was a minister. James Baldwin offered a vital literary voice during the era of civil rights activism in the 1950s and '60s. James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.” Going to Meet the Man (1965) collects Baldwin’s short fiction, including the masterful “Sonny’s Blues,” the unforgettable portrait of a jazz musician struggling with drug addiction in which Baldwin came closest to defining his goal as a writer: “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must be heard. Complex in structure and turbulent in mood, it is in many ways Baldwin’s most ambitious novel. Another Country (1962), a wide-ranging exploration of America’s racial and sexual boundaries, depicts the suicide of a gifted jazz musician and its ripple effect on those who knew him. Giovanni’s Room (1956) is a searching, and in its day controversial, treatment of the tragic self-delusions of a young American expatriate at war with his own homosexuality. Ten years in the writing, its exploration of religious, sexual, and generational conflicts was described by Baldwin as “an attempt to exorcise something, to find out what happened to my father, what happened to all of us.” His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), tells the story, rooted in Baldwin’s own experience, of a preacher’s son coming of age in 1930’s Harlem. His historical importance is indisputable.” Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin’s reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence. “The civil rights struggle,” said The New York Times Book Review, “found eloquent expression in novels.
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