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In one of the greatest American classics, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boys discovery of the terms of his identity. Baldwins rendering of his protagonists spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention 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." "With vivid imagery, with lavish attention to details ... [a] feverish story." - The New York Times