Michael Gold (April 12, 1894 – May 14, 1967) was the

pen-name A pen name, also called a ''nom de plume'' or a literary double, is a pseudonym (or, in some cases, a variant form of a real name) adopted by an author and printed on the title page or by-line of their works in place of their real name. A pen na ...

of Jewish American writer Itzok Isaac Granich. A lifelong communist, Gold was a novelist and literary critic. His semi-

autobiographical novel An autobiographical novel is a form of novel using autofiction techniques, or the merging of autobiographical and fictive elements. The literary technique is distinguished from an autobiography or memoir by the stipulation of being fiction. Bec ...

'' Jews Without Money'' (1930) was a bestseller. During the 1930s and 1940s Gold was considered the preeminent author and editor of U.S.

proletarian literature Proletarian literature refers here to the literature created by left-wing writers mainly for the class-consciousness, class-conscious proletariat. Though the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' states that because it "is essentially an intended device of ...

Background

Gold was born Itzok Isaac Granich on April 12, 1894, on the Lower East Side of

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

Romanian Jewish The history of the Jews in Romania concerns the Jews both of Romania and of Romanian origins, from their first mention on what is present-day Romanian territory. Minimal until the 18th century, the size of the Jewish population increased after ...

immigrant parents, Chaim Granich and Gittel Schwartz Granich. He had two brothers, Max and George.

Career

Mike Gold published his first writings under the name Irwin Granich. He reportedly took the

pseudonym A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true name (orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individua ...

Michael Gold at the time of the Palmer Raids on radicals in 1919-20 from a Jewish veteran of the

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states ...

whom he admired for having fought to "free the slaves."Barry Gross, "Michael Gold (1893-1967)", ''The Heath Anthology of American Literature'', ed. Paul Lauter, 5th edition. http://college.cengage.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/students/author_pages/modern/gold_mi.html ''

The Masses ''The Masses'' was a graphically innovative magazine of socialist politics published monthly in the United States from 1911 until 1917, when federal prosecutors brought charges against its editors for conspiring to obstruct conscription. It was ...

'', a socialist journal edited by

Floyd Dell Floyd James Dell (June 28, 1887 – July 23, 1969) was an American newspaper and magazine editor, literary critic, novelist, playwright, and poet. Dell has been called "one of the most flamboyant, versatile and influential American Men of Letters ...

and

Max Eastman Max Forrester Eastman (January 4, 1883 – March 25, 1969) was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet and a prominent political activist. Moving to New York City for graduate school, Eastman became involved with radical ...

, published his first pieces in August, 1914. "Three Whose Hatred Killed Them" is a poem about anarchists killed in a Lexington Avenue tenement by their own bomb. Gold praised their "pure intentions". Until his death he was an ardent supporter of the

Bolshevik Revolution The October Revolution,. officially known as the Great October Socialist Revolution. in the Soviet Union, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, was a revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin that was a key moment ...

of 1917 and of the Soviet Union in all its phases. In 1921-22 Gold and Claude McKay became Executive Editors of Max Eastman's magazine '' The Liberator.'' In 1922, Gold wrote: "The Russian Bolsheviks will leave the world a better place than Jesus left it. They will leave it on the threshold of the final victory—the poor will have bread and peace and culture in another generation, not churches and a swarm of lying parasite minister dogs, the legacy of Jesus." In 1925 Gold visited

Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 millio ...

. In 1926 he was a founding editor of ''

The New Masses ''New Masses'' (1926–1948) was an American Marxist magazine closely associated with the Communist Party USA. It succeeded both ''The Masses'' (1912–1917) and ''The Liberator''. ''New Masses'' was later merged into '' Masses & Mainstream'' (19 ...

'', which published leftist works and also set up radical theater groups. Gold served as editor-in-chief from June 1928 until 1934. At both ''The Liberator'' and ''The New Masses'', he favored publishing letters, poems and fiction by ordinary workers over works by literary leftists of bourgeois backgrounds. One of the widely noted articles he wrote for ''The New Masses'' was "

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny West neighborhood and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris ...

: A Literary Idiot". Here he charged that her works "resemble the monotonous gibberings of paranoiacs in the private wards of asylums ... The literary idiocy of Gertrude Stein only reflects the madness of the whole system of capitalist values. It is part of the signs of doom that are written largely everywhere on the walls of bourgeois society." In "Proletarian Realism" (1930), Gold said of Marcel Proust: "The worst example and the best of what we do not want to do is the spectacle of Proust, master-masturbator of the bourgeois literature." He also assailed the Pulitzer Prize winner

Thornton Wilder Thornton Niven Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975) was an American playwright and novelist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes — for the novel '' The Bridge of San Luis Rey'' and for the plays ''Our Town'' and '' The Skin of Our Teeth'' — ...

in equally vitriolic terms. Throughout the 1920s Gold worked on his only novel, '' Jews Without Money'', a fictionalized autobiography about growing up in the impoverished world of the Lower East Side. Published in 1930, shortly after the onset of the Great Depression, it was an immediate success and went through many print-runs in its first years and was translated into over 14 languages. It became a prototype for the American proletarian novel. In his ''Author's Note'' to the novel, Gold wrote, "I have told in my book a tale of Jewish poverty in one ghetto, that of New York. The same story can be of a hundred other ghettoes scattered over all the world. For centuries the Jew has lived in this universal ghetto." The popularity of ''Jews Without Money'' made Gold a national figure and cultural commissar of the

Communist Party A communist party is a political party that seeks to realize the socio-economic goals of communism. The term ''communist party'' was popularized by the title of ''The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. ...

. He was a daily columnist for its paper, the ''

Daily Worker The ''Daily Worker'' was a newspaper published in New York City by the Communist Party USA, a formerly Comintern-affiliated organization. Publication began in 1924. While it generally reflected the prevailing views of the party, attempts were ...

'', until his death. Gold himself was fond of repeating a quote from the novel: "O workers' Revolution!... You are the true Messiah!" The American Communist and labor-organizer

Fred Beal Fred Erwin Beal (1896–1954) was an American labor-union organizer whose critical reflections on his work and travel in the Soviet Union divided left-wing and liberal opinion. In 1929 he had been a ''cause célèbre'' when, in Gastonia, North Car ...

described Gold in Moscow in the early thirties as "sentimental revolutionist", anxious "to impress people with his 'proletarian' childhood", and with an intense destestation for liberals. As a critic, Gold fiercely denounced left-wing authors who he believed had deviated from the Communist Party line. Among those Gold denounced were screenwriter

Albert Maltz Albert Maltz (; October 28, 1908 – April 26, 1985) was an American playwright, fiction writer and screenwriter. He was one of the Hollywood Ten who were jailed in 1950 for their 1947 refusal to testify before the US Congress about their invo ...

and "renegade"

Ernest Hemingway Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century f ...

, who while never a Communist had been sympathetic to leftist causes but came under fire by some for his writing on the Spanish Civil War in ''

For Whom the Bell Tolls ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1940. It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer attached to a Republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As a dynamiter, he is assigned ...

''. Hemingway responded with "Go tell Mike Gold, Ernest Hemingway says he should go fuck himself."

Personal life and death

Gold was once romantically involved with

Dorothy Day Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) was an American journalist, social activist and anarchist who, after a bohemian youth, became a Catholic without abandoning her social and anarchist activism. She was perhaps the best-known ...

. Gold died in Terra Linda,

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

, on May 14, 1967, from complications following a stroke. He was 73 years old.

Legacy

Gold's papers reside at the

Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives The Tamiment Library is a research library at New York University that documents radical and left history, with strengths in the histories of communism, socialism, anarchism, the New Left, the Civil Rights Movement, and utopian experiments. T ...

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, th ...

in New York City. Alice Neel painted Gold's portrait in 1952 and then again after his death.

Footnotes

Works

*''Life of John Brown.'' Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1924.
''Proletarian Song Book of Lyrics from the Operetta "The Last Revolution."''
With J. Ramirez and Rudolph Liebich. Chicago: Local Chicago, Workers Party of America, 1925.
''The Damned Agitator and Other Stories.''
Chicago: Daily Worker Publishing, 1927. —Little Red Library #7. *''Hoboken Blues: a white fantasy on a black theme, in three acts.'' 1928. *''120 Million.'' New York:

International Publishers International Publishers is a book publishing company based in New York City, specializing in Marxist works of economics, political science, and history. Company history Establishment International Publishers Company, Inc., was founded in 1924 ...

, 1929. *''Fiesta: A Play in Three Acts.'' 1929. *''Money: A Play in One Act.'' New York:

Samuel French Samuel French (1821–1898) was an American entrepreneur who, together with British actor, playwright and theatrical manager Thomas Hailes Lacy, pioneered in the field of theatrical publishing and the licensing of plays. Biography French foun ...

, 1930."Money: A Play in One Act"
Worldcat.org. Retrieved January 24, 2020. *''Jews Without Money.'' New York: International Publishers, 1930. *''Charlie Chaplin's Parade.'' New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930. *''Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology.'' (Contributor.) New York: International Publishers, 1935.
''Change the World!''
New York: International Publishers, 1936. *''"Battle Hymn": A Play in Three Acts.'' With

Michael Blankfort Michael Seymour Blankfort (December 10, 1907 – July 13, 1982) was an American screenwriter, writer of books and playwright. He served as a front for the blacklisted Albert Maltz on the Academy Award-nominated screenplay of '' Broken Arrow (1 ...

. New York: Play Bureau, Federal Theatre Project, 1936. *''The Hollow Men.'' New York: International Publishers, 1941. *''David Burliuk: Artist-Scholar, Father of Russian Futurism.'' New York: A.C.A. Gallery, 1944. *''Rhymes for Our Times.'' With Bill Silverman and William Avstreih. Bronx, NY: Lodge 600, Jewish People's Fraternal Order of the International Workers Order, 1946. *''The Mike Gold Reader.'' New York: International Publishers, 1954.

External links

Michael Gold. ''Jews Without Money''
Full text at the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

.
Michael Gold. ''Change the World!''
Full text at the

.
Guide to the Grace Granich and Max Granich Papers, 1929-1998
Tamiment Library, New York University, New York City.

Spartacus Educational article.
Michael Gold at Goodreads
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gold, Mike 1894 births 1967 deaths 20th-century American novelists American communists American male journalists Journalists from New York City American literary critics American male novelists American socialists American people of Romanian-Jewish descent Jewish socialists American Marxist journalists American Marxist writers Members of the Communist Party USA Writers from New York City Jewish American novelists American Communist writers Novelists from New York (state) 20th-century American male writers