GOLD, HERBERT

GOLD, HERBERT (1924– ), U.S. novelist. Gold, who was born in Cleveland, recollected that "we were just about the only Jewish family in Lakewood at the time." He served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After the war he studied in Columbia and in Paris, finally settling in San Francisco, and eventually was appointed professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Gold's books deal with the search for love between men and women, parents and children. He has claimed that his writing is a need "to make the world magic" and his style – witty yet compassionate – reflects this. His most successful characters are young people who affect cynicism without being cynical, and who hide their real sensitivity behind a conventional mask. Gold's humor stems from the relentless truthfulness of his description of male and female relationships. His novels include The Birth of a Hero (1951), The Prospect Before Us (1954), The Man Who Was Not with It (1956), and The Optimist (1959). Therefore Be Bold (1960) is a humorous Jewish work set in the Middle West; Love and Like (1960) a collection of short stories; and Salt (1963) a satirical novel dealing with life in the impersonal metropolis. Gold also published essays on the contemporary American scene titled The Age of Happy Problems (1962). His "family" works are spun around the substance of his life: Fathers (1966), in which the novelist drew upon his own family experiences to tell of the Jewish immigrants who sought fulfillment in the United States; My Last Two Thousand Years (1972), and Family (1981). These memoirs are also mediations about the informing power (or lack of such) of place, tradition, class, and gender – this last especially in Family. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: B. Kretzer, Idealitat und Realitat der Frauenfiguren im modernen amerikanischen Roman: Saul Bellow, Herbert Gold, John Hawkes. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: J. Troiano, "Herbert Gold's Golden State," at: www.sanfranciscoreader.com\>\> . (Sylvia Rothchild / Lewis Fried (2nd ed.)