Go Tell It To The Mountain (James Baldwin)
James Baldwin is an African-American writer from the 20th Century. I had already read his Giovanni's Room (1956) when I decided to read Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and was surprised mostly by two differences between those novels. The first surprise was that it is a much more difficult read than Giovanni's Room . Not only the writing is less friendly but the story is also much more complex, with the background stories of several characters intertwining through time and space. It really feels like there are two different authors at work. I can imagine (and that's just me) several reasons for this. The first might be that Baldwin started writing Go Tell It on the Mountain as early as 1938 (when Baldwin was only fourteen years old). So even though the novels were published only a few year apart, they could be works of Baldwin in two very different maturity stages (personally and as a writer). Go Tell It on the Mountain is also very autobiographical , which is not t