Early years

Itzik Isaac Granich, better known by the pen-name "Michael Gold," was born in New York City on April 12, 1893 to Rumanian immigrant parents.

Literary career

The revolutionary magazine The Masses published his first piece in 1914. It was a poem about three anarchists who are killed in a bomb explosion. He was an ardent supporter of the Communist Revolution of 1917. He first adopted the pseudonym "Michael Gold" during the Palmer Raids of 1919-20.

Gold became editor of The Liberator in 1921. In 1925, he made a trip to Moscow. He was a founder of The New Masses, which published leftist works and also set up radical theater groups. In 1928, he became the editor-in-chief. As editor, he chose to publish works by proletarian authors rather than literary leftists. Championing proletarian literature, Gold did much to help make it popular during the depression years of 1930s.

One of the articles he wrote for The New Masses was "Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot", where he assaults her works as appearing "to 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."

Jews Without Money

In 1930, Gold published his most influential work, Jews Without Money, a fictionalized autobiography about growing up in the impoverished world of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which Gold had been working on throughout the 1920s. The book was eventually translated into more than 14 languages and would become a prototype for the American Proletarian novel. On the last page of the novel, the poor Jewish boy prays for the arrival of a Marxist, worker's revolution that will emancipate the working class.

Gold's autobiographical novel is set on the East Side of New York City in a slum populated mainly by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father is a painter, but suffers from sickness because of the lead in the paint. At first he manages to make a living for the family, but when he falls from a scaffold, he is no longer able to continue as a painter. Since he has no other trade, the family is pushed into further poverty. Michael, his young son, is forced to go out and work. His wife gets a job in a restaurant. The family is forced to live from hand to mouth. Although he is a bright boy, the young Michael decides he must leave school and try to get a job to support the family. Gold's novel paints a picture of immigrant life in the early part of the 20th century.

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."

Popularity

Gold himself was fond of repeating a quote from the novel: "O workers' Revolution!... You are the true Messiah!"

The popularity of the novel made Gold a national figure and cultural commissar of the Communist Party. Gold became a daily columnist for the Daily Worker until his death.

As a critic, Gold fiercely denounced left wing authors who he held deviated from the Communist Party line. Among those he denounced were Albert Maltz and "renegade psyche" Ernest Hemingway—who, retaliating, once said, "Go tell Mike Gold, Ernest Hemingway says he should go fuck himself."

Death and legacy

Gold died in Terra Inda, California, on May 14, 1967 from complications following a stroke. He was 74 years old at the time of his death.

Gold's papers reside at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives at New York University in New York City.