Mike Gold (April 12, 1893, New York City – May 14, 1967, Terra Inda, California), was the pseudonym for Itzok Isaac Granich. He was a lifelong communist and a combative left-wing American literary critic. One of three sons born to a family of Jewish immigrants named Granich on the Lower East Side of New York City, he reportedly took his pseudonym from a Jewish Civil War veteran he admired for having fought to "free the slaves."[1] During the 1930s and 1940s, writing as Michael Gold, he was considered the "Dean of U.S. Proletarian Literature."
Contents [hide] 1 Literary career 2 Jews Without Money 3 Popularity 4 Personal 5 References 6 Works 7 Sources
[edit] 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 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."[2]
[edit] Jews Without Money In 1930, Gold published his most influential work, Jews Without Money[3], 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.[1] 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."
[edit] Popularity Gold himself was fond of repeating a quote from the novel: "O workers' Revolution!... You are the true Messiah!"[4]
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." [5]
[edit] Personal Gold died in Terra Inda, California, in 1967 at the age of 74 from complications following a stroke.[6]
[edit] References ^ a b Gross, Barry. "Michael Gold (1893-1967)". In Paul Lauter (Ed.), The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Fifth Edition. http://college.cengage.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/students/author_pages/modern/gold_mi.html ^ Gold, Michael. Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology. Ed. Michael Folsom. New York: International Publishers, 1972. 206. ^ Gold, Mike. Jews Without Money, New York: Horace Liveright, 1930. Reprinted by Carol & Graf in 2004. ^ "From Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941", Post-Contemporary Interventions, Barbara Foley, Duke University Press, 1993, p. 312. ^ Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life, Scribners, New York, 1969; p. 459. ^ "Michael Gold, Author, Is Dead". New York Times. May 15, 1967. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0810FE395E137A93C4A8178ED85F438685F9. Retrieved 2008-08-25.
[edit] Works Life of John Brown Girard, Kan. Haldeman-Julius Co., 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 Pub. Co., 1927 (Little red library #7) Money: a play in one act New York, Samuel French Inc., 1929 120 million New York, International publishers, 1929 Jews without money New York, International publishers, 1930 Charlie Chaplins Parade New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1930 Proletarian literature in the United States; an anthology (with others) New York, International publishers, 1935 Change the world! New York, International publishers, 1936 "Battle hymn"; a play in three acts, (with Michael Blankfort) 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, N.Y. : Lodge 600, Jewish People's Fraternal Order of the International Workers Order, 1946 The Mike Gold reader New York, International publishers, 1954 [edit] Sources Jews Without Money, by Michael Gold (New York: Horace Liveright, 1930) (New York: Carol & Graf, 2004) Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 (Post-Contemporary Interventions by Barbara Foley, Duke University Press, 1993, p. 312. Mike Gold: Dean of American Proletarian Literature by John Pyros (Published Dramatika; January 1980) Encyclopedia of Literature and Politics: Censorship, Revolution, and Writing A-Z [Three Volumes] by M. Keith Booker (Published 2005 Greenwood Publishing Group) Bloom, James. Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman (Columbia University Press, 1992) Rideout, Walter B. The Radical Novel in the United States: 1900-1954. Some Interrelations of Literature and Society. New York: Hill and Wang, 1966. James A. Michener Art Museum: Bucks County Artists - Michael Gold NYU Tamiment Library: Guide to the Grace Granich and Max Granich Papers, 1929-1998 (Tamiment 255) Google Books: Crisis in the Working Class, p. 68 Questia: The People's Doctor: George Hatem and China's Revolution by Edgar A. Porter (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997) Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Gold" Categories: 1893 births | 1967 deaths | American atheists | American journalists | American literary critics | American novelists | American socialists | Jewish American writers | Jewish atheists | Jewish novelists | Marxist journalists | Marxist writers | Members of the Communist Party USA | People from New York City | Writers from New York