He might become a Great Leader of His People. and it was said that he had a Great Future. There is, primarily, the sin of his mind, which is unlike others in his community: Not that John believes he belongs in paradise, not really.

What held the book together was Baldwin’s extraordinary sensibility, and his deep understanding of his 14-year-old protagonist, John, who feels - who knows - life might be something else if prejudice and poverty and his hateful and hated father, a part-time Pentecostal preacher named Gabriel, didn’t threaten to follow him all the days of his life and beat him out of heaven when he got there. When Knopf eventually received the manuscript for “Mountain,” it appeared that its peripatetic author - who had lived abroad, mostly in Paris, since 1948 - had typed the story out on all sorts of typewriters and on many different kinds of stationery. Cole brought a few of his pieces to Knopf’s editor in chief, Harold Strauss, who contacted Baldwin’s agent and learned that he was at work on a novel. And what Cole found in the emotionally charged writing were thoughts that sometimes - thrillingly - strained against its own gorgeous, literary, knowing style: Baldwin “read,” but from up high. Always on the lookout for fresh voices, the publicist read magazines like The New Leader, Commentary and The Nation, where, a few years earlier, essays and reviews by a man named James Baldwin had begun to appear with some frequency. Back then, the young James Baldwin - he was just 28 when “Mountain” came out - had a protector named William Cole, who was Knopf’s publicity director.

Knopf, who published his first novel, “ Go Tell It on the Mountain,” in 1953.

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