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DS, one page, 8.5 x 11, August 21, 1947. Agent's copy of Baldwin's Vanguard Press contract for an option on Crying Holy, the working title of what would become his acclaimed 1953 debut novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. In part: "This will confirm the agreement Vanguard Press has reached with you to the effect that we are to pay you $150.00 for an option on your novel entitled Crying Holy. After you complete this manuscript, you are to submit it to us, and we are to have sixty days from the date of the submission in which to decide whether or not to publish it. If we decide in the negative, you are to keep the $150.00, and all obligations between us will terminate." Signed at the conclusion in fountain pen by James Baldwin, and countersigned by Vanguard Press president James Henle. In fine condition.
Dating to a pivotal early stage in James Baldwin’s career, this 1947 contract documents the long gestation of his first novel, then titled Crying Holy. Baldwin was just 23 and still years away from literary fame when Vanguard Press paid him $150 for an option on the manuscript, which he had already been developing for years. The novel drew heavily on his Harlem upbringing, his difficult relationship with his preacher father, and his own youthful experience in the Pentecostal church. Although Vanguard ultimately did not publish the book, the contract preserves an important early milestone in the evolution of the autobiographical work that would establish Baldwin as a major new American literary voice.
Baldwin continued reshaping the manuscript—at one stage titled In My Father’s House—after moving to Europe in 1948. He completed a substantially revised version in Switzerland in February 1952 and sent it to Alfred A. Knopf, which soon expressed interest; galley proofs were prepared later that year, and Knopf published Go Tell It on the Mountain in May 1953. Baldwin’s debut novel, centered on fourteen-year-old John Grimes and a single transformative day in a Harlem Pentecostal church, was rooted partly in his own childhood and received strong critical attention on publication. It has since become one of Baldwin’s defining works and a landmark of 20th-century American literature.
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