Go Tell It on the Mountain
The novel from a year earlier, set in the same Harlem church world.
Read our take
The Amen Corner
James Baldwin's first play: a woman pastors a Harlem storefront church, and then the husband she has told the congregation nothing about walks in.
- 1968
- 112
- Elegiac
- Melancholy
- voice-driven
- dark
- autobiographical
About James Baldwin
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeA three-act play James Baldwin wrote in 1954, the year after his first novel. Sister Margaret Alexander runs a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem and holds her son David and her sister Odessa inside the life it demands. Her estranged husband Luke, a jazz musician, arrives sick, and what the congregation learns about her marriage costs her the pulpit. Students at Howard University staged it in 1955; it did not reach Broadway until 1965.
The story, in more detail
Baldwin had spent three years preaching in a Harlem Pentecostal church, from about fourteen to seventeen, and the play is built out of that. The speech of the congregation, the order of a service, the way authority inside a small church actually works — all of it is written from the inside.
Margaret has told her church that Luke left her. Luke's account is the reverse: she left him, taking David, after their second child was born dead. The play turns on which version the congregation believes, and on the fact that the truth does not make her a worse pastor, only a removable one.
David is eighteen and has been playing piano in places his mother would not approve of. His decision about whether to stay in the church runs alongside his father's illness, and Baldwin does not resolve the two together.
It took ten years to reach a professional stage. Owen Dodson directed a student production at Howard University in May 1955, and a Los Angeles run eventually carried it to Broadway in 1965, where it lasted eighty-four performances. Dial Press did not publish the text until 1968.
Themes and analysis
The authority of the pulpit
In the opening-sermon passages quoted by Melanie R. Hill, Margaret makes biblical authority reach into ordinary habits. Reading the comics and earning a living by delivering liquor become tests of whether a person can belong wholly to God. Her address also anticipates the complaint that she is too strict, then absorbs that objection into the sermon itself. The speech leaves little room for neutral activity: attention is either devoted or dangerously divided. Onstage, this way of speaking establishes more than a doctrine. It establishes the pastor's claim to interpret the congregation's daily choices.
The pianist's other calling
The piano carries a family history that David has not been free to discuss. In the excerpted exchange with Luke, praise for his father's playing turns into the question of why he stayed away. The remembered hope of playing together lets artistic aspiration and the wish for a father sound in the same speech. David's anger does not cancel his admiration; their coexistence gives the conversation its strain. Luke's advice to make use of pain offers a way forward, but it cannot supply the years the questions are asking him to explain.
Why we recommend it
It is short and it is spoken
Around a hundred pages of dialogue. Baldwin's prose can be dense; his stage writing is not, and the church language he grew up with carries the play without needing description.
Sister Margaret is not a hypocrite
The easy version of this play would expose a fraud. Baldwin wrote a woman who believes what she preaches and is removed anyway, which is a harder thing to sit through.
It sits beside his first novel
Go Tell It on the Mountain covers the same Harlem church world in the third person. This is the version with no narrator in it.
What this book explores
Timeline
1954
Baldwin writes the play, the year after Go Tell It on the Mountain is published.
1955
The Howard University Players stage the premiere at Spaulding Hall from 11 May, directed by Owen Dodson.
1965
It opens on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 15 April, directed by Frank Silvera, and runs eighty-four performances.
1968
Dial Press publishes the text.
2013
The National Theatre in London revives it.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- The Dial Press
- 1968
- Paperback
- Vintage International
- 1998
- 9780375701887
Reader reviews
Readers may also like
The Fire Next Time
Where Baldwin writes about his own years in the pulpit as himself rather than through a character.
Read our take
The Amen Corner: frequently asked questions
What is The Amen Corner about?
It is a play by James Baldwin about Sister Margaret Alexander, the pastor of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem. Her estranged husband Luke, a jazz musician, comes back ill; her eighteen-year-old son David is pulling away from the church toward music; and the congregation, learning that Margaret left Luke rather than the other way round, moves to take the pulpit from her.
Was The Amen Corner Baldwin's first play?
Yes. He wrote it in 1954, after the success of his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. His second play, Blues for Mister Charlie, came ten years later.
When was The Amen Corner first performed?
At Howard University in Washington, D.C., in May 1955, by the Howard University Players under Owen Dodson, who had pressed Baldwin for the script. Its Broadway opening was ten years later, on 15 April 1965 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.
Is it based on Baldwin's own life?
Partly. Baldwin preached in a Harlem Pentecostal church from around the age of fourteen for about three years, and the play's church language, services and internal politics come from that. Sister Margaret is not his mother and David is not him, but the world is one he worked in.
How long is the play?
About 112 pages in the Vintage International edition, in three acts. It reads in an evening.
Where does the title come from?
The amen corner is the section of a church where the most vocal members of the congregation sit and call out responses during a service. In the play it is also where Margaret's authority is decided.
If you like James Baldwin
Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The doctor of the Paris slums who wrote the century's blackest, funniest novel — and changed the sound of French prose.
View author
Henry Miller
The Brooklyn dropout who arrived in Paris broke at thirty-eight and wrote the exuberant, banned books that ended American censorship.
View author
Ernest Hemingway
Author of The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast; his pared-down style, developed in 1920s Paris, became the most imitated in American prose.
View author
References
References
The sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document The Amen Corner, its publication, and its place in literary history.
1The Amen Corner
NovelJames Baldwin, 1968Used forThe primary text represented by this page, used for descriptions of the work’s contents and for any quoted passages shown here.
2Set Thine House in Order: Black Feminism and the Sermon as Sonic Art in The Amen Corner
WebsiteReligions 10(4), article 271 / ResearchGate, 2019Used forUsed for Baldwin's quoted speech rather than as evidence of a full-play or original-edition reading.
3The Amen Corner: dialogue excerpt in TABE Review
WebsiteFlorida Gateway CollegeUsed forPrimary dialogue in the left column; adjacent multiple-choice questions are not used as literary evidence. The teaching excerpt contains omissions and is not an original-edition collation.
4James Baldwin papers, 1936–1992 (Sc MG 936), finding aid
ArchiveSchomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public LibraryUsed forUsed to place The Amen Corner within James Baldwin's published work and verify its bibliographic context.
5Chicago Public Library — James Baldwin Biography
WebsiteUsed forUsed for independent biographical, archival, or historical context surrounding James Baldwin's career and the period in which The Amen Corner appeared.
6Baldwin in France
WebsiteNational Museum of African American History and CultureUsed forUsed to cross-check authorship, chronology, and the work's place in James Baldwin's wider catalogue.
7Baldwin, James Arthur
WebsiteThe Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford UniversityUsed forUsed to verify James Baldwin's bibliography and place The Amen Corner within the broader chronology of James Baldwin's career.
i
Why these sources are here
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
Explore more resources