Baldwin's first novel, drawn from his own boyhood as a teenage preacher in Harlem, is built around a single day in March 1935 and the long night of prayer that ends it. Fourteen-year-old John Grimes, stepson of Gabriel Grimes — a storefront Pentecostal preacher whose holiness at the altar coexists with cruelty at home — is expected to take the pulpit himself, and over the novel's three movements the family's buried history surfaces in flashback: Gabriel's sister Florence, Gabriel's own violent youth in the South, and John's mother Elizabeth and the man Gabriel replaced. The book closes on the threshing floor of the Temple of the Fire Baptized, where John's conversion comes not as submission but as survival. The Modern Library ranked it among the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century, and Time placed it on its own hundred-best list.
Author: James Baldwin · Original publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 1953
