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Gerald Jay Goldberg (born December 30, 1929) is an American author. Professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, he is a novelist, critic, and (with Robert Goldberg) author of a nonfiction study of the network news and a biography of Ted Turner.

Goldberg’s best-known work is The Lynching of Orin Newfield (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, 1970), a powerful novel about a “communal murder . . . in a small farming town in Vermont.” His novels and short stories...ranging widely in setting, subject, and technique...are intense, witty, and elegantly crafted. Reviewers have compared his crisp prose and caustic humor to Nathanael West, Donald Barthelme, Joseph Heller and Thomas McGuane. Saul Bellow’s description of McGuane as “a language star” is, in fact, an apt description for Goldberg as well. His command of metaphor and detail is (like McGuane’s) remarkable, each sentence precisely, relentlessly original. “His prose sparkles,” The New York Times wrote, “with well-observed idiosyncrasies.” The Chicago Sun-Times ranked Goldberg’s 126 Days of Continuous Sunshine with Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 for its evocation of “California insanity.” The Los Angeles Herald Examiner praised Heart Payments for its “wonderful textured evocation of the L.A. art scene of the late 1960s.” Of The Lynching of Orin Newfield, The New Yorker concluded: “The tension and clarity of Mr. Goldberg’s writing leave us no choice but to follow his raging anti-hero’s story from the comparatively mild beginning to the thundering finish.”

There was considerable Hollywood interest in Orin Newfield, following its publication in 1970. Though never produced, the novel was optioned by Buck Henry, Victor Drai Productions and James B. Harris. Goldberg himself wrote a screenplay. Jerry Harvey, programming chief of Los Angeles’s legendary Z channel, nearly succeeded in bringing Orin Newfield to the screen. Before Harvey’s death in 1988, he had arranged for Sam Peckinpah to direct the film.

Goldberg’s two nonfiction “media” books (Anchors and Citizen Turner, both co-authored with his son, Robert Goldberg) were widely acclaimed and translated into several languages. Anchors was reprinted in Reader’s Digest’s Today’s Best Nonfiction (1991). Citizen Turner is, by critical consensus, the best of the many biographies of Turner.

Goldberg is currently at work on two projects: a second collection of short stories and a new novel, a thriller entitled An Accident in Taziac.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Gerald Jay Goldberg", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0