The novel also reveals the back stories of John's mother, his biological father, and his violent, fanatically religious stepfather, Gabriel Grimes.

[2] James Baldwin was born in 1924 in Harlem to an unwed mother who had left Maryland for New York and never knew his biological father.

Several years later, his mother married a much older laborer and Baptist preacher from Louisiana who had come north in 1919.

"[3] During his high school years,[4] uncomfortable with the fact that, unlike many of his peers, he was becoming more sexually interested in men than in women, Baldwin sought refuge in religion.

In February 1952, Baldwin sent a later version of the manuscript from Paris, France, where he was living at the time, to New York publishing house Alfred A. Knopf.

His younger half-brother Roy also resents his father's strictness, but unlike John has begun to rebel by running with a rough crowd.

John returns home to find that Roy has gone with some neighborhood boys to pick a fight and has been cut with a knife.

She recalls her devout mother leading them in prayer after the rape of a girl, Deborah, by a group of white men.

Florence eventually left home despite her mother's illness to go north to New York where she met Frank, whom she married.

The marriage was not happy as Frank drank and was irresponsible with money, both buying her extravagant gifts and spending on binges.

These thoughts lead him to his affair with a woman named Esther, who subsequently became pregnant and died giving birth to his son, Royal.

Later, during a period of racial tensions after a black soldier has been lynched, Gabriel encountered Royal walking home and warned him to be careful.

Seeing John, Gabriel recalls that he had believed that meeting and marrying Elizabeth was a sign that God had forgiven him.

Barbara Olson summarized the dispute noting that "those favoring vindication number in their ranks such notable critics as Albert Gerard, Donald Gibson, and Shirley Allen" while "those favoring the indictment position include Robert Bone, Michel Fabre, Nathan Scott, Howard Harper, Stanley Macebuh, David Foster and Trudier Harris.

[14] The strict Pentecostal religion of the Temple of the Fire Baptized, enforced by John's father, demands that believers live separately from much of the world around them.

[15] Similarly, Part Three "The Threshing-Floor" is an allusion to Matthew 3:12, in which John the Baptist states that on the threshing floor Jesus will separate the wheat (saved) from the chaff (unsaved).

Baldwin includes excerpts from many spirituals throughout the novel but especially as John is undergoing his religious vision and the "saints" of the church sing around him, each of which highlights a particular aspect of the narrative.

John the Baptist's mother Elizabeth, the archangel Gabriel, the prophetess Deborah, and the Jewish Queen Esther also provide names of significant characters.

[17] In addition, much of the characters' speech is laced with biblical quotations and references, which both provides a note of verisimilitude in the dialogue but also a layer of religious symbolism.

John questions his father's visceral animosity towards white people, while at the same time feeling acutely aware of his blackness as he leaves Harlem and walks through other parts of the city.

Without ever being quite comfortable, he wonders about the promise of other opportunities in these white-dominated spaces, such as the New York Public Library, which he does not enter (but not, he tells himself, because he is black) and the movie theater, which he finds, despite his momentary trepidation, admits him without comment on his race.

Deborah's rape as an adolescent at the hands of a group of white men, and later a brutal lynching and castration of a black soldier highlight the violence of racism in the South for both Florence and Gabriel.

It is noteworthy that Florence's prayer features a rape, reinforcing the status of black women, already highlighted by their mother's favoritism toward Gabriel as the son.

Elizabeth's prayer reinforces that African Americans have not escaped racism by coming north; the brutal treatment of Richard at the hands of the police and the justice system causes his suicide.

[25] Other relationships throughout the novel also cast light on the notion of family including Gabriel's emotionally and physically sterile marriage to Deborah, Elizabeth's adoption by her aunt and abandonment by her father, Florence's resentment toward her mother, Gabriel's lack of relationship with his biological son Royal, Elizabeth's relationship with John's biological father Richard, Florence's marriage to the unreliable Frank, and Florence and Gabriel's mother's reflections on her lovers and children while still a slave.

Although raised by a single mother, the patriarchal environment meant that Gabriel's future matters more than Florence's.

Mason Stokes notes that Florence rejects "the regulatory regimes of the heteropatriarchal household"; not only does she reject the men who lusted after her beauty "not wishing to exchange her mother's cabin for theirs and to raise their children", her final act is to undermine Gabriel's authority by promising to reveal his prior infidelity and abandonment of his son Royal to Elizabeth and the church community.

"[29] The novel has been translated into numerous languages, including Swedish, French, Japanese, Finnish, German, Italian, Polish, Norwegian, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Czech, Arabic, and Dutch.

In 1988, a teacher in Prince William County, Virginia, offered the book as a ninth-grade summer reading option.

Parents challenged the book because of "recurring themes of rape, masturbation, violence, and degrading treatment of women".