James Baldwin publishes Go Tell It on the Mountain

James Baldwin's debut novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, published May 18, 1953, drew on his Harlem childhood and complex relationship with the Pentecostal church to create one of the most celebrated coming-of-age novels in American literature. Baldwin went on to become the preeminent literary voice of the civil rights era, with works like The Fire Next Time establishing him as an essential moral and artistic conscience of American life.