author
Michael Gold
1893–1967
A fierce, plainspoken voice of working-class New York, this novelist and critic turned his own Lower East Side childhood into one of the best-known portraits of immigrant poverty in American literature. His writing is direct, urgent, and closely tied to the politics and struggles of his time.
1 Audiobook
Life of John Brown
by Michael Gold
About the author
Born Itzhok Isaak Granich in New York City in 1893, he wrote under the name Michael, or Mike, Gold. He grew up on the Lower East Side in a poor Jewish immigrant family, and that experience shaped the book he is best known for, Jews Without Money (1930), a semi-autobiographical novel that became a bestseller.
Gold was more than a novelist: he was also a journalist, editor, playwright, columnist, and literary critic. Deeply committed to left-wing politics, he became one of the leading voices of proletarian literature in the United States and was closely associated with radical publications and cultural debates of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.
Today he is remembered above all for the vivid energy of Jews Without Money, which captures the hardship, humor, anger, and community life of immigrant New York. Even when readers disagree with his politics, his work remains an important window into American urban life and the literary culture of the left in the early twentieth century.