A novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic, Baldwin was a “witness to the truth” about racism and homophobia in American society, writing from his own experience as a Black gay man. He grew up in Harlem, spending much of his teenage years in libraries and eventually following his stepfather into preaching before leaving home to pursue writing. In 1948 he moved to Paris, where he found the distance to write about the American society he’d grown up in—including his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in 1953.