Background
Granich on April 12, 1894, in New York City, the son of Chaim Granich, a peddler and suspenders-fixtures manufacturer, and Gittel Schwartz. His impoverished Jewish immigrant parents were from Romania and Hungary, respectively.
(First edition. Introduction by Joseph Freeman. Literature...)
First edition. Introduction by Joseph Freeman. Literature about the American working class during the economic crisis of the depression, written with various degrees of revolutionary fervor. More than fifty selections, including fiction by Erskine Caldwell, Jack Conroy, and Michael Gold, poetry by Maxwell Bodenheim, Kenneth Fearing, and Langston Hughes, reportage by John Dos Passos, Agnes Smedley, and Joseph North, drama by Albert Maltz and Clifford Odets, literary criticism by Malcolm Cowley, Granville Hicks, etc. With list of contributors. A little soiling to covers. 384 pages. cloth. small 8vo..
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( As a writer and political activist in early-twentieth-...)
As a writer and political activist in early-twentieth-century America, Michael Gold was an important presence on the American cultural scene for more than three decades. Beginning in the 1920s his was a powerful journalistic voice for social change and human rights, and Jews Without Money--the author's only novel--is a passionate record of the times. First published in 1930, this fictionalized autobiography offered an unusually candid look at the thieves, gangsters, and ordinary citizens who struggled against brutal odds in lower East Side Manhattan. Like Henry Roth's Call It Sleep and Abraham Cahan's The Rise and Fall of David Levinsky, Jews Without Money is a literary landmark of the Jewish experience. Michael Gold (1893–1967) was born in New York City, where later he wrote for radical journals and newspapers such as New Masses and The Liberator. Jews Without Money has been translated in more than fourteen countries, including Germany, where the novel was employed against Nazi propaganda.
https://www.amazon.com/Jews-Without-Money-Michael-Gold/dp/0786713453?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0786713453
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(Book by Gold, Michael)
Book by Gold, Michael
https://www.amazon.com/Mike-Gold-literary-anthology-Michael/dp/0717803465?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0717803465
Granich on April 12, 1894, in New York City, the son of Chaim Granich, a peddler and suspenders-fixtures manufacturer, and Gittel Schwartz. His impoverished Jewish immigrant parents were from Romania and Hungary, respectively.
Granich was valedictorian of his grade-school class, but the family's poverty forced him to drop out of school at age twelve. After his studies in journalism at New York University and an unhappy semester as a special student at Harvard in 1914, Gold reported on a factory strike for the magazine Blast.
From 1905 to 1914, Granich worked long hours as a night porter, clerk, and driver for the Adams Express Company. He first became attracted to the radical movement in 1914, when he heard Elizabeth Gurley Flynn speak in Union Square, New York City. At this time his brother Emannuel (Manny) was becoming active in the Industrial Workers of the World. From 1915 to 1917 Granich contributed poems to The Masses, edited by Max Eastman, and to the socialist paper the New York Call. During the Palmer Raids and Red Scare of 1919-1920, Granich assumed the pen name Michael Gold, borrowing the name of a friend's father who had been a Civil War corporal. Until the early 1920's Gold lived the transient life of a Bohemian anarchist intellectual. He became involved with George Cram ("Jig") Cook and Cook's Provincetown Players, who produced his one-act plays Down the Airshaft and Ivan's Homecoming (both 1917), as well as plays by Eugene O'Neill, Floyd Dell, and John Reed. After attending rehearsals, Gold would join O'Neill, and Catholic Worker publisher Dorothy Day and anarchist friends, at the Hell-Hole, a writers' saloon in Greenwich Village, where they talked of art and revolution. Gold's later dramas showed his commitment to proletarian art. Hoboken Blues (1928) was a fantasy of Harlem life based on the constructivist theories of Vsevolod Meyerhold. It was produced by the New Playwrights Theater, established by Gold, John Dos Passos, and John Howard Lawson. A second full-length play, Fiesta (1929), was based on his experiences from 1917 to 1919 while working on the Tampico oil fields in Mexico, where he became further acquainted with Marxism. Neither of these plays was successful as literature. Gold's most important work was Jews Without Money (1930). This novel, an episodic, fictional account of Gold's impoverished childhood, was an impassioned plea for a socialist transformation of American society. Gold's preoccupation with the frightening experiences of his ghetto youth often resulted in a lack of aesthetic distance in his work, especially the poems. Together with Jews Without Money, Gold is most noted for his theoretical pronouncements on "proletarian literature, " the most important of which are "Towards Proletarian Art" (Liberator, February 1921) and "Proletarian Realism" (New Masses, October 1930). Unlike many middle-class radicals, Gold thought that a proletarian literature would aid in bringing the worker to class consciousness and thus prepare him for the coming class revolution. Gold allied his theoretical positions with practical commitment to social reform, working with the Communist party as a journalist and editor long after many literary radicals had left the movement following the revelation of Stalin's repressive acts in the 1930's and 1940's. In 1920 Gold became a contributing editor of the Liberator, the successor to The Masses; in 1926 he became editor of New Masses, where, through the first half of the 1930's, he enjoyed his greatest literary and editorial influence. In 1933 he became a regular columnist with the Daily Worker, producing thousands of columns until almost the end of his life. Since bursts of essay-length work seemed to appeal to him more than long compositions, and since he devoted much time to daily involvement with radical movements, Gold never produced another major novel like Jews Without Money. He left several unfinished novels at his death. In his critical and polemical essays, Gold exerted a strong influence both upon the Communist movement and upon the critical life of his time. In his famed "Prophet of the Genteel Christ" (New Republic, November 22, 1930), Gold ridiculed Thornton Wilder's novels as reactionary, and attacked New Humanism and T. S. Eliot's adherence to the traditional in art. Some of Gold's acerbic political articles were collected in 120 Million (1929) and Change the World! (1937). The Hollow Men (1941) gathered five of his most vitriolic essays against "renegades" who had been alienated from Communism by the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. In the last decade of his life Gold retired to San Francisco, where despite decreasing vision he continued to write for the Worker (the successor to the Daily Worker) and the People's World. He died in Terra Linda, California on May 14, 1967.
( As a writer and political activist in early-twentieth-...)
(Book by Gold, Michael)
(First edition. Introduction by Joseph Freeman. Literature...)
Quotes from others about the person
Gold was remembered by Edmund Wilson as the most dedicated and most "naturally gifted" of the American Communist writers, for whom the workers' revolution represented, as Gold wrote at the conclusion of Jews Without Money, "the true Messiah. "
