Editing James Baldwin (section)

==== ''Go Tell It on the Mountain'' (1953) ====
{{main|Go Tell It on the Mountain (novel)}}
Baldwin sent the manuscript for ''Go Tell It on the Mountain'' from Paris to New York publishing house [[Alfred A. Knopf]] on February 26, 1952, and Knopf expressed interest in the novel several months later.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=87}} To settle the terms of his association with Knopf, Baldwin sailed back to the United States in April 1952 on the [[SS Île de France|SS ''Île de France'']], where [[Themistocles Hoetis]] and [[Dizzy Gillespie]] were coincidentally also voyaging—his conversations with both on the ship were extensive.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=87}} After his arrival in New York, Baldwin spent much of the next three months with his family, whom he had not seen in almost three years.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=88}} Baldwin grew particularly close to his younger brother, David Jr., and served as best man at David's wedding on June 27.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=87}} Meanwhile, Baldwin agreed to rewrite parts of ''Go Tell It on the Mountain'' in exchange for a $250 advance (${{inflation|US|250|1952|fmt=c}} today) and a further $750 (${{inflation|US|750|1952|fmt=c}} today) paid when the final manuscript was completed.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=88}} When Knopf accepted the revision in July, they sent the remainder of the advance, and Baldwin was soon to have his first published novel.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=89}} In the interim, Baldwin published excerpts of the novel in two publications: one excerpt was published as "Exodus" in ''[[American Mercury]]'' and the other as "Roy's Wound" in ''[[New World Writing]]''.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=89}} Baldwin set sail back to Europe on August 28 and ''Go Tell It on the Mountain'' was published in May 1953.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=89}}

''Go Tell It on the Mountain'' was the product of years of work and exploratory writing since his first attempt at a novel in 1938.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=92}} In rejecting the ideological manacles of protest literature and the presupposition he thought inherent to such works that "in Negro life there exists no tradition, no field of manners, no possibility of ritual or intercourse", Baldwin sought in ''Go Tell It on the Mountain'' to emphasize that the core of the problem was "not that the Negro has no tradition but that there has as yet arrived no sensibility sufficiently profound and tough to make this tradition articulate."{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=91}} Baldwin biographer [[David Leeming]] draws parallels between ''Go Tell It on the Mountain'' and [[James Joyce]]'s 1916 ''[[A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man]]'': to "encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."{{sfn|Leeming|1994|pp=64, 92}} Baldwin himself drew parallels between Joyce's flight from his native [[Ireland]] and his own run from Harlem, and Baldwin read Joyce's tome in Paris in 1950, however, in Baldwin's ''Go Tell It on the Mountain'', it would be the Black American "uncreated conscience" at the heart of the project.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|pp=91–92}}

The novel is a [[bildungsroman]] that explores the inward struggles of protagonist John Grimes, the illegitimate son of Elizabeth Grimes, to claim his own soul as it lies on the "[[Matthew 3:12|threshing floor]]"—a clear allusion to another John: [[John the Baptist|the Baptist]], born of another [[Elizabeth (biblical figure)|Elizabeth]].{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=92}} John's struggle is a metaphor for Baldwin's own struggle between escaping the history and heritage that made him, awful though it may be, and plunging deeper into that heritage, to the bottom of his people's sorrows, before he can shrug off his psychic chains, "climb the mountain", and free himself.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=92}} John's family members and most of the characters in the novel are blown north in the winds of the Great Migration in search of the [[American Dream]] and all are stifled.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=93}} Florence, Elizabeth, and Gabriel are denied love's reach because racism assured that they could not muster the kind of self-respect that love requires.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=93}} Racism drives Elizabeth's lover, Richard, to suicide—Richard will not be the last Baldwin character to die thus for that same reason.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=92}} Florence's lover Frank is destroyed by searing self-hatred of his own Blackness.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=92}} Gabriel's abuse of the women in his life is downstream from his society's emasculation of him, with mealy-mouthed religiosity only a hypocritical cover.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=92}}

The phrase "in my father's house" and various similar formulations appear throughout ''Go Tell It on the Mountain'' and was even an early title for the novel.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=91}} The house is a metaphor at several levels of generality: for his own family's apartment in Harlem, for Harlem taken as a whole, for America and its history, and for the "deep heart's core".{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=91}} John's departure from the agony that reigned in his father's house, particularly the historical sources of the family's privations, came through a [[Conversion narrative|conversion experience]].{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=93}} "Who are these? Who are they?" John cries out when he sees a mass of faces as he descends to the threshing floor: 'They were the despised and rejected, the wretched and the spat upon, the earth's offscouring; and he was in their company, and they would swallow up his soul."{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=94}} John wants desperately to escape the threshing floor, but "[t]hen John saw the Lord" and "a sweetness" filled him.{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=94}} The midwife of John's conversion is Elisha, the voice of love that had followed him throughout the experience, and whose body filled John with "a wild delight".{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=94}} Thus comes the wisdom that would define Baldwin's philosophy: per biographer David Leeming: "salvation from the chains and fetters—the self-hatred and the other effects—of historical racism could come only from love."{{sfn|Leeming|1994|p=94}}