Go Tell It on the Mountain Themes

In Go Tell It On the Mountain, sex is everywhere you look… literally. There's no privacy so everybody's aware of everybody's business. And it's a big deal; sex generally leads to babies (this boo...

Harlem in 1935, at least as Go Tell It On the Mountain presents it, is a pretty violent place. Whether it's boys getting stabbed in the streets or wives and children being beaten in their homes, no...

In Go Tell It On the Mountain, gender lines are super clear-cut and hyper-normative. There are very particular roles for women and men to fill, and nobody really steps out of line. This relationshi...

Sin: it's (s)in the bed, it's (s)in the streets, it's (s)in the movie theaters… sin is everywhere in Go Tell It On the Mountain. It's a huge preoccupation for the highly religious characters in t...

Where do we even begin? This novel is about religion from front to back and top to bottom. The main character's father is a preacher; almost all of the action takes place in a church; the main stor...

Even though the novel Go Tell It On the Mountain really only takes place over the course of one day and night, a whole lot happens in that 24 hours… and we're not only talking about all the memor...

Go Tell It On the Mountain spans a time frame in US history in which North and South were super starkly divided. It reaches far back into the time of slavery and the Civil War, when the South was h...

We've saved the biggest for last, folks. This topic is huge in all of James Baldwin's work, but in this, his first novel, it's particularly prevalent. The oppression of the black characters is a co...