| 1921 | "Towards Proletarian Art." Gold's essay, published in the Liberator, offers an influential definition of the aims and methods of proletarian literature. Michael Gold was the pen name of Irving Granich, the editor of the Masses and the New Masses, whose best-known work was the novel Jews Without Money (1930). |
| 1930 | Jews Without Money. Gold coins the term proletarian realism in 1930 and uses it in his most acclaimed work, an autobiographical, gritty depiction of Jewish tenement life on New York's Lower East Side. |