Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) is the best of Baldwin's novels, and the best is very good indeed. It ranks with Jean Toomer's Cane, Richard Wright's Native Son, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as a major contribution to American fiction. For this novel cuts through the walls of the storefront church to the essence of Negro experience in America. This is Baldwin's earliest world, his bright and morning star, and it glows with metaphorical intensity. Its emotions are hi...

There are several remarkable things about [Go Tell It on the Mountain], the most impressive of which is Baldwin's ability to make the experiences of the story immediate and definitive. He achieves this end through the use of his facile way with words and the oratorical flourish of the preacher. The immediacy is more strongly felt when we realize that Baldwin himself is preaching to us, not only in the way he knew as a boy preacher, but also as a persuasive writer reaching out to an audience. Also, hi...

Go Tell it on the Mountain is concerned with the initiation of John Grimes, a fourteen year-old Negro boy. He is exposed to the bitter realities of ghetto life and sees at first hand the consequences of the resulting tensions in terms of individual lives. In the course of the book he undergoes what is apparently a profound religious conversion—a conversion which seems to reconcile him with his situation…. But his conversion does not represent an acknowledgment of religious truth or an acceptan...

James Baldwin's "Go Tell It on the Mountain" … is a first novel of quite exceptional promise, centering on a church in Harlem…. The Temple of the Fire Baptized is the scene of a conflict between a growing boy with a real vocation and his preacher stepfather, a compulsive lecher whose sense of guilt, rather than a true call, has brought him to the pulpit…. Mr. Baldwin … gives an extraordinarily vivid picture of the intellectual seediness and poverty of this ki...

Mr. Baldwin's first novel ["Go Tell It on the Mountain"] is written as skilfully as many a man's fifth essay in fiction. His handling of the flashbacks so that they show the past without interrupting the drama of the present is masterful. His penetration of the mind of John, especially in the scene of his conversion, is as valid as anything in William James's "Varieties of Religious Experience" and as moving as the interior monologues in [William] Faulkner&#x...