Abstract
Go Tell It on the Mountain was published in 1953; it is James Baldwin's first novel and a real success. It took him ten years to complete this work, he was a very polyvalent writer and he published novels: Another Country (1962), short stories: Going to Meet the Man (1965) scripts and plays: The Amen Corner (staged in 1955)… The author was born in Harlem in 1924; he attended New York City public schools and was a brilliant student. After graduation in 1942 he did manual jobs and moved to Greenwich Village to write. There he met Richard Wright, in 1944 who became his “tutor”. In 1948 Baldwin moved to Paris, he spent six years in France and Switzerland where he worked for American journals and concentrated on the writing of his novel. As far as politics is concerned, James Baldwin was an activist in America's Civil Rights movement and achieved the status of unofficial African-American spokesman on racial issues.
