Baldwin was only able to complete his first novel once he stopped running from his father and from the spirituals and prayers that guided the lives of his people. Photograph by Andreas Feininger / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty

This piece is drawn from the introduction to a new edition of “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” by James Baldwin, which is out from Everyman’s Library, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Group, on March 1st. Read Colm Toíbín on “Giovanni’s Room.”

In “Notes for a Hypothetical Novel,” an address delivered at San Francisco State College on October 22, 1960, and later published in the essay collection “Nobody Knows My Name,” James Baldwin pretended he was writing a novel in front of an audience.

“Let’s pretend,” he said, “that I want to write a novel concerning the people or some of the people with whom I grew up, and since we are only playing let us pretend it’s a very long novel. I want to follow a group of lives almost from the time they open their eyes on the world until some point of resolution, say, marriage, or childbirth, or death.”

Baldwin had already published “Go Tell It on the Mountain” seven years earlier, so it appeared that he was not referring to this particular novel. In other talks and essays, he laid out some ideas about what made an unsuccessful novel, citing problems like too neat a frame, sentimentality, and facile lessons and solutions. The novel he was referring to in the speech, though, he claimed, was both “unwritten and probably unwritable.” Neither was it meant to be a “long, warm, toasty” novel. “This hypothetical book is aiming at something more implacable than that. . . . The social realities with which these people, the people I remember, whether they knew it or not, were really contending can’t be left out of the novel without falsifying their experience.”

As the speech continued, a boy emerged in Baldwin’s hypothetical novel, a boy who’d “backslid,” or had slipped away from the church he’d grown up in, to go smoke cigarettes and have sex. This boy was then rejected by the community and died of tuberculosis a year and a half later. This boy was not the only casualty of the church’s disapproval. A young woman lost her mind and ended up in a mental hospital. (Baldwin’s preacher stepfather, who was the only father he knew, died of tuberculosis in a mental hospital in 1943.) Still, Baldwin refused to limit his hypothetical novel to a roster of disasters.

“The imagination of a novelist has everything to do with what happens to his material,” he said. As the speech neared its end, however, it became clear that the two novels Baldwin had already written, and the ones he had yet to write, were part of this hypothetical oeuvre. “Go Tell It on the Mountain” was only his first attempt.

Initially titled “Crying Holy,” “Go Tell It on the Mountain” was written after Baldwin gave up being a youth preacher and left the church to become a writer. He worked on the book for more than ten years, including while he was living in Greenwich Village and Paris, and he only managed to finish it in 1952, after he'd moved to Loèche-les-Bains, a village in the Swiss Alps.

In a 1961 interview with the American broadcaster and oral historian Studs Terkel, Baldwin remembered thinking that he might never finish the novel. One of the reasons he couldn’t finish, he realized, was that he was ashamed of where he came from. “I was ashamed of the life in the Negro church,” he told Terkel, “ashamed of my father, ashamed of the Blues, ashamed of Jazz, and, of course, ashamed of watermelon: all of these stereotypes that the country inflicts on Negroes, that we all eat watermelon or we all do nothing but sing the Blues. Well, I was afraid of all that; and I ran from it.”

He was only able to complete the novel once he stopped running from his father and from the spirituals and prayers that guided, for good or for ill, the lives of his people, both the actual people he mentioned in his address and his novel’s characters. Incidentally, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is dedicated to Baldwin’s mother and father, who each seem to have a doppelgänger in the novel.

Given the title, one might expect the novel’s epigraph to be the refrain of the African-American spiritual: “Go tell it on the mountain / Over the hills and everywhere / Go tell it on the mountain / That Jesus Christ is born.” After all, this song has been sung by preachers as well as Christmas carollers, by civil-rights marchers as well as popular gospel singers, ever since it was catalogued by the Fisk professor John Wesley Work, Jr., in 1907. This is one of many instances where Baldwin bypasses the obvious while delivering a structurally and substantially original novel, one that surpasses his very high expectations for a great novel. This novel is not just a well-thought-out and well-crafted lyrical work but also a protest chant, a hymn, a rebuke, a memorial, a prayer, a testimonial, a confessional, and, in my opinion, a masterpiece.

“Go Tell It on the Mountain” is framed around the twenty-four hours that make up John Grimes’s fourteenth birthday. The day begins on a sour note when John mistakenly thinks no one remembers. But his mother does remember and she gives him some money, which he uses to explore the city for the day.

John’s stops at different New York City landmarks outside Harlem allow Baldwin (who was, like John, a child of the Great Migration, the mass movement of more than six million African-Americans from the rural South to urban centers in the northern United States) to paint a vivid picture of nineteen-thirties New York and the mixed feelings the city evokes. He writes, of John seeing the skyline from a hill in Central Park,

He did not know why, but there arose in him an exultation and a sense of power, and he ran up the hill like an engine, or a madman, willing to throw himself headlong into the city that glowed before him. But when he reached the summit he paused; he stood on the crest of the hill, hands clasped beneath his chin, looking down. Then he, John, felt like a giant who might crumble this city with his anger.

John’s anger at the city is born out of his exclusion from its splendors and riches. On this of all days, John dreams of a future that’s drastically different from his current life. He dreams of becoming a poet, a movie star, or a college president. He also dreams of becoming a conqueror, “before whom multitudes cried, Hosanna! He would be, of all, the mightiest, the most beloved, the Lord’s anointed; and he would live in this shining city which his ancestors had seen with longing from far away.”