Our cultural touchstones series looks at influential books.
Despite publishing James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, publishing house Alfred A. Knopf rejected his second. Upon receiving the manuscript of Giovanni’s Room in 1955, editor Henry Carlisle pronounced it a failure, telling Baldwin the novel, if published, would damage the author’s reputation.
While Carlisle insisted the rejection had nothing to do with the book’s content, Baldwin was convinced otherwise. Knopf, he thought, did not want a story of homosexual love between a white American expat living in Paris and an Italian bartender being told by a Black man from Harlem.
