James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic, and one of America's foremost writers. His essays, such as "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-twentieth-century America. A Harlem, New York, native, he primarily made his home in the south of France.
His novels include Giovanni's Room (1956), about a white American expatriate who must come to terms with his homosexuality, and Another Country (1962), about racial and gay sexual tensions among New York intellectuals. His inclusion of gay themes resulted in much savage criticism from the black community. Going to Meet the Man (1965) and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968) provided powerful descriptions of American racism. As an openly gay man, he became increasingly outspoken in condemning discrimination against lesbian and gay people.
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Book Description
James Baldwin's stunning first novel is now an American classic. With startling realism that brings Harlem and the black experience vividly to life, this is a work that touches the heart with emotion while it stimulates the mind with its narrative style, symbolism, and excoriating vision of racism in America. Moving through time from the rural South to the northern ghetto, starkly contrasting the attitudes of two generations of an embattles family, "Go Tell It On The Mountain is an unsurpassed portrayal of human beings caught up in a dramatic struggle and of a society confronting inevitable change.
"The most important novel written about the American Negro," says "Commentary. "It is written with poetic intensity and great narrative skill," writes "Harper's. "Saturday Review praises it as "masterful," and the "San Francisco Chronicle declares that this important American novel is "brutal, objective and compassionate."
Amazon.com
First published in 1953 when James Baldwin was nearly 30, Go Tell It on the Mountain is a young man's novel, as tightly coiled as a new spring, yet tempered by a maturing man's confidence and empathy. It's not a long book, and its action spans but a single day--yet the author packs in enough emotion, detail, and intimate revelation to make his story feel like a mid-20th-century epic. Using as a frame the spiritual and moral awakening of 14-year-old John Grimes during a Saturday night service in a Harlem storefront church, Baldwin lays bare the secrets of a tormented black family during the depression. John's parents, praying beside him, both wrestle with the ghosts of their sinful pasts--Gabriel, a preacher of towering hypocrisy, fathered an illegitimate child during his first marriage down South and refused to recognize his doomed bastard son; Elizabeth fell in love with a charming, free-spirited young man, followed him to New York, became pregnant with his son, and lost him before she could reveal her condition.
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
The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Semiautobiographical novel by James Baldwin, published in 1953. Based on the author's experiences as a teenaged preacher in a small revivalist church, the novel describes two days and a long night in the life of the Grimes family, particularly the 14-year-old John and his stepfather Gabriel. It is a classic of contemporary African-American literature. Baldwin's description of John's descent into the depths of his young soul was hailed as brilliant, as was his exploration of Gabriel's complex sorrows. The novel teems with biblical references. Though the novel is in part about the position of blacks in American society, some critics felt that Baldwin inadequately addressed racial issues; the novelist, however, said he made a deliberate attempt to break out of the "cage" of black writing.
About Author
James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, and educated in New York. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews and immediately was recognized as establishing a profound and permanent new voice in American letters. "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else," he remarked. Baldwin's play The Amen Corner was first performed at Howard University in 1955 (it was staged commercially in the 1960s), and his acclaimed collection of essays Notes of a Native Son, was published the same year. A second collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, was published in 1961 between his novels Giovanni's Room (1956) and Another Country (1961).
The appearance of The Fire Next Time in 1963, just as the civil rights movement was exploding across the American South, galvanized the nation and continues to reverberate as perhaps the most prophetic and defining statement ever written of the continuing costs of Americans' refusal to face their own history. It became a national bestseller, and Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time magazine. Critic Irving Howe said that The Fire Next Time achieved "heights of passionate exhortation unmatched in modern American writing." In 1964 Blues for Mister Charlie, his play based on the murder of a young black man in Mississippi, was produced by the Actors Studio in New York. That same year, Baldwin was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and collaborated with the photographer Richard Avedon on Nothing Personal, a series of portraits of America intended as a eulogy for the slain Medger Evers. A collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man, was published in 1965, and in 1968, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, his last novel of the 1960s appeared.
In the 1970s he wrote two more collections of essays and cultural criticism: No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976). He produced two novels: the bestselling If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979) and also a children's book Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976). He collaborated with Margaret Mead on A Rap on Race (1971) and with the poet-activist Nikki Giovanni on A Dialogue (1973). He also adapted Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X into One Day When I Was Lost.
In the remaining years of his life, Baldwin produced a volume of poetry, Jimmy's Blues (1983), and a final collection of essays, The Price of the Ticket. Baldwin's last work, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), was prompted by a series of child murders in Atlanta. Baldwin was made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor in June 1986. Among the other awards he received are a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Partisan Review fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant.
James Baldwin died at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in France on December 1, 1987.
Book Dimension:
length: (cm)20.8 width:(cm) 13.8
發表於2024-11-08
Go Tell It on the Mountain 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載
前不久,我無意間發現瞭兩本美國黑人著名作傢:詹姆斯.鮑德溫的《比爾街情仇》《嚮蒼天呼籲》!而且還是中文版!雖然版本很老舊,前者是1995年,後者1983年齣版。書頁因時間的原因以褐黃和有些破損,但不影響閱讀。我迴到傢後馬上翻開開始瞭閱讀。 《比爾街情仇》也稱《假若比...
評分知道鮑德溫,是因為杜漸得得《書海夜航》中介紹過這個美國黑人文學作傢,那已是很久很久以前的事瞭。 所以,前不久在潘傢園市場看到這本2元的《嚮蒼天呼籲》,也就毫不猶豫的買下,這一讀,也就從2011年的最後一天翻到瞭2012年的最初兩天,算是跨年度閱讀,(^o^)/~。 當這本書...
評分知道鮑德溫,是因為杜漸得得《書海夜航》中介紹過這個美國黑人文學作傢,那已是很久很久以前的事瞭。 所以,前不久在潘傢園市場看到這本2元的《嚮蒼天呼籲》,也就毫不猶豫的買下,這一讀,也就從2011年的最後一天翻到瞭2012年的最初兩天,算是跨年度閱讀,(^o^)/~。 當這本書...
評分前不久,我無意間發現瞭兩本美國黑人著名作傢:詹姆斯.鮑德溫的《比爾街情仇》《嚮蒼天呼籲》!而且還是中文版!雖然版本很老舊,前者是1995年,後者1983年齣版。書頁因時間的原因以褐黃和有些破損,但不影響閱讀。我迴到傢後馬上翻開開始瞭閱讀。 《比爾街情仇》也稱《假若比...
評分知道鮑德溫,是因為杜漸得得《書海夜航》中介紹過這個美國黑人文學作傢,那已是很久很久以前的事瞭。 所以,前不久在潘傢園市場看到這本2元的《嚮蒼天呼籲》,也就毫不猶豫的買下,這一讀,也就從2011年的最後一天翻到瞭2012年的最初兩天,算是跨年度閱讀,(^o^)/~。 當這本書...
圖書標籤: 英文 英文原版 詹姆斯鮑德溫 美國小說 美國 小說 James_Baldwin EthanHawke
給自己母親想齣來的初戀好動人,繼父和阿姨的故事也很動人,和elisha的少年愛喧賓奪主。其實都很動人。沒想到宗教題材也沒讓我打退堂鼓。
評分給自己母親想齣來的初戀好動人,繼父和阿姨的故事也很動人,和elisha的少年愛喧賓奪主。其實都很動人。沒想到宗教題材也沒讓我打退堂鼓。
評分給自己母親想齣來的初戀好動人,繼父和阿姨的故事也很動人,和elisha的少年愛喧賓奪主。其實都很動人。沒想到宗教題材也沒讓我打退堂鼓。
評分給自己母親想齣來的初戀好動人,繼父和阿姨的故事也很動人,和elisha的少年愛喧賓奪主。其實都很動人。沒想到宗教題材也沒讓我打退堂鼓。
評分給自己母親想齣來的初戀好動人,繼父和阿姨的故事也很動人,和elisha的少年愛喧賓奪主。其實都很動人。沒想到宗教題材也沒讓我打退堂鼓。
Go Tell It on the Mountain 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載