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.

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.