We The Readers

Celebrate the 250^th anniversary of The Declaration of Independence this year at Downtown with a search for The Great American Novel.

This month we are reading Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, published 1953.

Baldwin's classic novel opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."

Next month: Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko