Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email
Answers.com

Herbert Gold

 
Works: Works by Herbert Gold
(b. 1924)

1951Birth of a Hero. Gold's first novel treats a successful lawyer's midlife crisis. His attempts to live a more heroic life backfire. It is the first of the Cleveland-born writer's skillful portraits of American life and modern angst.
1956The Man Who Was Not with It. Gold's third novel, following two realistic depictions of Midwestern life, Birth of a Hero (1951) and The Prospect Before Us (1954), is considered by many his best. It concerns a carnival worker who is a morphine addict.
1959The Optimist. Gold's novel about an idealist's pursuit of the American dream shows the writer's shift from realism to a more symbolic, allegorical approach.
1967Fathers: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir. Weaving together fact and fiction, Gold treats his background and his relationship with his parents in the first of two novels. Family would follow in 1981.
1980He/She. This novel is about a marriage breakup and the difference between male and female perceptions of the world. Critics admire Gold's sympathetic portrait of a woman who does not love her husband and tries to face that fact squarely. Each phase of this couple's estrangement is charted with perception and humor--a hallmark of Gold's best fiction.

Search unanswered questions...
Enter a question here...
Search: All sources Community Q&A Reference topics
Wikipedia: Herbert Gold
Top

Herbert Gold (born March 9, 1924 in Cleveland, Ohio) is a Jewish-American novelist.

Contents

Early life

Gold was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in Lakewood, a community he was later to memorialize in his first book, Birth of a Hero, published in 1951 by Viking Press. He moved to New York City at age 17 after several of his poems had been accepted by New York literary magazines. While there, he studied philosophy at Columbia University and became involved with the burgeoning Beat Generation, which resulted in a lifelong friendship with writer Allen Ginsberg.

Career

Gold won a Fulbright Scholarship and moved to Paris, where he finished his first novel. After that, he moved around as he wrote, traveling to Haiti and Detroit, and hitchhiking all over the United States. He married Edith Zubrin and had two daughters with her, Ann Gold (b. 1950) and Judith Gold (b. 1952). They later divorced, and he finally settled in San Francisco, where he became an important fixture in the literary scene.

Genesis West volume six was published in the Winter of 1964 with an interview of Herbert Gold by Gordon Lish.

Gold was married to Melissa Dilworth and had three children with her: daughter Nina Gold and twin boys Ari and Ethan. After they divorced, she became involved with concert promoter Bill Graham, dying in the helicopter crash that took Graham's life in 1991.

He is a father of five (Ann, Judith, Nina, Ari, and Ethan), and a grandfather of six (Sarah, Sasha, and David Buscho, children of Ann; Sonia and Nora Heidenreich, daughters of Judith; and Ella, daughter of Nina).

Selected works

External links


 
 

 

Copyrights:

Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Herbert Gold" Read more