Michael Gold

Michael Gold
Mike Gold before a New York crowd (1930s)
Born	Itzok Isaac Granich (1894-04-12)April 12, 1894 Lower East Side, New York City
Died	May 14, 1967(1967-05-14) (aged 73) Terra Linda, California
Occupation	editor, author, literary critic
Nationality	American
Literary movement	Proletarian literature
Notable works	Jews Without Money

Michael "Mike" Gold (April 12, 1894 – May 14, 1967) was the pen-name of Jewish American writer Itzok Isaac Granich. A lifelong communist, Gold was a novelist and literary critic. His semi-autobiographical novel Jews Without Money (1930) was a bestseller. During the 1930s and 1940s Gold was considered the preeminent author and editor of U.S. proletarian literature.

Gold was born Itzok Isaac Granich on April 12, 1894, on the Lower East Side of New York City to Romanian Jewish immigrant parents, Chaim Granich and Gittel Schwartz Granich. He had two brothers, Max and George. Mike Gold published his first writings under the name Irwin Granich. He reportedly took the pseudonym Michael Gold at the time of the Palmer Raids on radicals in 1919-20 from a Jewish Civil War veteran whom he admired for having fought to "free the slaves."

He was once romantically involved with Dorothy Day.

The Masses, a socialist journal edited by Floyd Dell and Max Eastman, published his first pieces in August, 1914. "Three Whose Hatred Killed Them" is a poem about anarchists killed in a Lexington Avenue tenement by their own bomb. Gold praised their pure intentions. Until his death he was an ardent supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and of the Soviet Union in all its phases. In 1921-22 Gold and Claude McKay became Executive Editors of Max Eastman's magazine The Liberator. In 1922, Gold wrote: "The Russian Bolsheviks will leave the world a better place than Jesus left it. They will leave it on the threshold of the final victory—the poor will have bread and peace and culture in another generation, not churches and a swarm of lying parasite minister dogs, the legacy of Jesus.