James Baldwin’s Creative Process: Theorizing the 1941 Manuscript of "Go Tell It on the Mountain"

More than three decades after his death, the work of writer James Baldwin holds a prominent place in American letters, and one that grows in stature with ongoing study (as well as being refreshed in the visual medium with the Academy Award-winning adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk). Baldwin's debut novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, had an extended gestation period before its publication in 1953; how the novel got there will be discussed by Jacqueline Goldsby, Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of African American Studies at Yale University. The talk is part of the Humanities Without Boundaries series hosted by the UW Center for the Humanities.

press release: Please note: This is a rescheduled event. Jacqueline Goldsby was originally going to deliver this talk on Monday, April 4, 2022.

Biographers and critics have long accepted James Baldwin’s account of how he ended the writing block that stymied his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). In the all-white village of Loèche-les-Bains, Switzerland, Baldwin recounted, and critics agree, the novel’s elusive core came into Baldwin’s grasp as he listened to Bessie Smith’s blues singing. 

In her lecture, Professor Goldsby probes beyond this critical consensus, to trace a multi-medium field of influence on Baldwin’s deservedly-lauded masterpiece. Starting with Baldwin’s “creative process” (an important and less-studied 1962 essay), together with Baldwin’s understudied 1941 manuscript draft of the novel, Goldsby argues that Baldwin’s immersion in visual arts during the 1930s and 1940s—cinema, photography, painting, and printmaking—proved central to his revisions of “Crying Holy” into the work we now know as Go Tell It on the Mountain. The formal innovations that distinguish the published text—young John Grimes’ interiorized struggle with his faith and sexuality; the novel’s dilatory scope of time; and the reader’s interpellation into the social world of the text—follow from Baldwin’s engagements with these visual arts as much as blues music. Theorizing Go Tell It on the Mountain as a multi-medium text, Goldsby challenges the origin story scholars and critics have used to canonize Baldwin’s first novel. 

Jacqueline Goldsby is Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of African American Studies and English at Yale University, where she also currently chairs the Department of African American Studies. She is the author of the prizewinning A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2006), editor of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015), and author of other articles about 20th century African American literature and book history. She founded and directed “Mapping the Stacks: A Guide to Black Chicago’s Hidden Archives” and co-directs “The Black Bibliography Project” with Meredith L. McGill. She is currently at work on Writing from the Lower Frequencies: African American Literature and Its Mid-Century Moment and Doing a New Thing: The Art and Life of James Baldwin.