BALDWIN, James.

Go Tell It On The Mountain.

“The rebirth of the soul is perpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan": First Edition of Go Tell It On the Mountain; Signed by James Baldwin and Finely Bound by the Harcourt Bindery

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953.

$6,500.00

In Stock Item Number: RRB-149707

Custom Clamshell Box (+$450)

* Custom Clamshell Boxes are hand made by the Harcourt Bindery upon request and take approximately 60 days to complete

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First edition of Baldwin's first book. Octavo, bound in full morocco by the Harcourt Bindery with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, gilt ruling to the front and rear panel, gilt inner dentelles stamp-signed by the Harcourt Bindery, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. Boldly signed by James Baldwin on a page bound-in. In fine condition. An exceptional presentation, rare and desirable signed.

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.