Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first novel. This book was published by Dell Publishing, in 1952. This novel relies heavily on autobiography as its structure. Like the central character, John Grimes, Baldwin grew up in Harlem under the supervision of a religious stepfather. David Baldwin, like Gabriel Grimes, was a Baptist preacher. James, experienced a powerful religious conversion at the age of fourteen, almost exactly as he portrayed John as having one. David became a minister at Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, where he preached for three years. However the most relevant and apparent fact that is very evident in Baldwin's life as well as his character, John's, was the terrible relationship that he shared with his stepfather.
             Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924. He never knew his biological father. He attended New York City public schools, where he worked on school publications and received encouragement on his writing. After graduation in 1942, Baldwin took several jobs before moving to Greenwich Village to write. In 1944 he met Richard Wright, who immediately liked Baldwin's writing enough to recommend it for a grant. Baldwin won the grant and in 1948 he moved to Paris. Baldwin spent the next six years in France and Switzerland, publishing various essays and working on his novel. The novel was finally published in 1952.
             In the late 1950s Baldwin emerged as a powerful and influential voice in America's Civil Rights movement. As an activist, journalist, lecturer, and essayist, he achieved the status of an unofficial African-American spokesman on racial issues. His non-fiction writing in particular greatly showed his voice of reasoning on these great issues. Baldwin continued to write novels, short stories, scripts, plays, and journalism well into the 1980s. He died in France of cancer of the esophagus in 1987.
             In Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin describes the course of the fourteenth birthday ...