One of the most brilliant and provocative American writers of the twentieth century chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention in this “truly extraordinary” novel ( Chicago Sun-Times ). Baldwin's classic novel 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."

Text Difficulty 5 - Text Difficulty 7

970 Lexile.

Electronic reproduction. New York : Vintage, 2013. Requires the Libby app or a modern web browser.