Gold, Michael (c. 1893-1967)

US writer, editor, journalist, and playwright. He founded and edited the newspaper New Masses (1926-c. 1935), and also contributed columns to the communist newspaper, the Daily Worker (1933-67). 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 attempted to exemplify in his best-known novel, Jews Without Money (1930).

The son of Jewish immigrants from Romania and Hungary, Gold was born in New York City. 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)