Gold, Michael

Gold, Michael (b. Itzok Isaac Granich) (?1893–1967) writer, editor, journalist, playwright; born in New York City. The son of Romanian-and Hungarian-Jewish immigrants, he left school at age 12 and worked for the Adams Express Company (1905–12). Drawn to radical-Marxist thought, he published articles and short stories in socialist publications and saw three of his one-act plays produced by the Provincetown Players in New York. He went to Mexico to escape the draft during World War I and returned to New York to work as an editor on the Liberator (1920) and then founded and edited the New Masses (1926–c. 1935). He also contributed columns to the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker (1933–67), and in defending Stalinism against the Trotskyites, he attacked fellow American leftist-liberal writers he felt had betrayed the cause. His own preference was for "proletarian literature," a term he coined, and his best-known novel, Jews Without Money (1930), is in that genre.