Gold, Michael

GOLD, MICHAEL (1893–1967). Born Itzok Granich to impoverished Jewish immigrants on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Michael Gold derived the major themes of his long career from those roots and reflected them most prominently in his major literary work, the fictionalized autobiography Jews without Money (1930). Like the boy in that novel, Gold dropped out of school in the eighth grade, but in real life, he also had a year of journalism classes at New York University (1912–1913) and a traumatic year as a special student at Harvard (1914). His novel concludes with a political rally that leads to a leftist conversion. The origin of that account was a rally in 1914, but Gold was not as politically naive as his fictional counterpart. He had considerable exposure to radical ideas through his younger brother Manny, who was active in the Industrial Workers of the World. Even after Gold became associated with the Communist Party, anarchist and syndicalist ideas would retain some appeal, for he remained an unsystematic and eclectic thinker.

Gold’s first radical publication was in The Masses (1914–1917) and in the Sunday supplement of the New York Call (1916). Three of his one-act plays were performed by the Provincetown Players in 1916, 1917, and 1920, respectively. The entire period was filled with political and personal anguish. In 1918 he went to Mexico to avoid the draft, and during the Red Scare of 1919–1920 he changed his name to Michael Gold as a protective measure. Nonetheless, in 1920 he became editor of The Liberator, successor to The Masses, which had been suppressed in 1917. Six years later he became editor of the New Masses (1926–1947), which succeeded The Liberator. His period of greatest literary influence would be from the founding of the New Masses until the mid-1980s, a time when he was identified as the leading American advocate of proletarian literature.

The high point of his most fruitful period was publication of Jews without Money. In addition to the work’s considerable intrinsic merits, its appearance coincided with the deepening of a depression that made a novel about poverty pertinent to a mass audience. Friends hailed him as the American Gorky, but Gold was never to fulfill his promise as a writer of fiction. Although he published short stories and left versions of partly completed novels at his death, there would be no second novel. His energy seemed to flow more naturally to editing and journalism than to fiction. He became a columnist for the Daily Worker in 1933, a role he would retain until the end of his life. As a columnist he could write in the short spurts that came easily to him and he could make immediate comments on ongoing political and literary controversies.

His columns were always provocative. He loved a literary fight. Max Eastman, his old mentor at The Masses, Thornton Wilder, and James T. Farrell were early targets. His grounds for attack were usually more ideological than literary and he became increasingly acerbic as he took up the bitter task of denouncing “renegades” whom the Moscow Trials and Hitler-Stalin Pact had alienated from the Communist Party. His views on the inadequacies of Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, Waldo Frank, Robinson Jeffers, Sherwood Anderson, and Granville Hicks are found in The Hollow Men (1941), a collection of his Daily Worker columns. Another bitter dispute came in 1947 when he lashed out at Albert Maltz, radical novelist and screenwriter, who advanced the view that the politics of a writer did not necessarily determine the quality of that writer’s work. Gold’s last decade was spent in the San Francisco Bay area, where he worked on a memoir, which he never completed. He died in quiet obscurity, one of the few literary radicals of the 1920s and 1930s who never left the Communist movement. Ironically, he is now most respected not for his theoretical polemics but for his novel. Jews without Money remains a classic account of the Jewish ghetto during the first years of the twentieth century.

Foley, Barbara. Radical Representation and Form in U.S. Proletarian Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

Folsom, Michael, ed. Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology. New York: International Publishers, 1972.