About this Item
First Dell mass-market printing (#3007), 1965. Differs from Amazon photo - our copy has a black cover with red lettering on spine. Cover edges frayed, light creasing to corners, expected shelfwear with age. Strong binding. Previous owner's name on inside page. Mild yellowing to page edges. Text clean, no underlining. Good copy overall. Seller Inventory # 5D4000008L57_ns
Bibliographic Details
Title: Go Tell It on the Mountain
Publisher: Dell
Publication Date: 1985
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Condition: Good
About this title
Baldwin lays down the terrible symmetries of these two blighted lives as the ironic context for John's dark night of the soul. When day dawns, John believes himself saved, but his creator makes it clear that this salvation arises as much from blindness as revelation: "He was filled with a joy, a joy unspeakable, whose roots, though he would not trace them on this new day of his life, were nourished by the wellspring of a despair not yet discovered."
Though it was hailed at publication for its groundbreaking use of black idiom, what is most striking about Go Tell It on the Mountain today is its structure and its scope. In peeling back the layers of these damaged lives, Baldwin dramatizes the story of the great black migration from rural South to urban North. "Behind them was the darkness," Baldwin writes of Gabriel and Elizabeth's lost generation, "nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire--a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!" This is Baldwin's music--a music in which rhapsody is rooted anguish--and there is none finer in American literature. --David Laskin
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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