Herbert Gold, 99, was postwar novelist
Herbert Gold, a novelist whose verbal inventiveness and keen eye for the complicated emotional transactions of love and marriage established him as one of the most promising of the young American writers to emerge after World War II, died Sunday at his home in San Francisco. He was 99.
His death was confirmed Monday by his daughter Ann Gold Buscho.
Born in Ohio, Mr. Gold brought a Midwestern skepticism and a deflating sense of humor to his tales of ordinary men and women trying to gain a foothold in the slippery terrain of romance — or, like him, struggling to connect the world of their Jewish immigrant parents with the realities of American life.
He was hard to categorize, and perhaps for that reason never had the kind of celebrated career that peers such as Norman Mailer and Philip Roth enjoyed and that his early books seemed to augur. “Herbert Gold always seems on the verge of writing the big one,” Newsweek wrote in 1967.
But if the big one never arrived, Mr. Gold did produce, with regularity, a distinctive brand of fiction and journalism.
His first novel, “The Birth of a Hero” (1951), and the extravagantly praised “The Man Who Was Not With It” (1956) showed a hipster sensibility in their treatment of heroes working toward self-realization in a square American world. In “Salt” (1963), he turned a cold, knowing eye on love and ambition in the self-contained worlds of Madison Avenue and Wall Street.
The lurid carnival setting of “The Man Who Was Not With It” and Mr. Gold’s rich use of carny slang — some of it his own invention — offered a compelling picture of an alternative, underground America. But Mr. Gold, characteristically, distanced himself from the hipster label.
“If I can ever find the main office of the Beat Generation, I plan to hand in my resignation,” he once said, although he analyzed the Beats and the 1960s counterculture shrewdly in “Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love, and Strong Coffee Meet” (1993).
His most admired novels addressed a different theme: the complexities of Jewish identity in the United States. He explored this subject in two works that blended memoir and fiction — “Fathers” (1967) and its sequel, “Family” (1981) — and in a novel-memoir that tilted more strongly toward autobiography, “My Last Two Thousand Years” (1972). In 2008, he published a nonfictionalized memoir, “Still Alive! A Temporary Condition.”
Herbert Gold was born March 9, 1924, in Lakewood, a suburb of Cleveland, which he liked to call, with tongue in cheek, “the Paris of northeastern Ohio.” His father, Samuel Gold, who had immigrated from Ukraine as a teenager, ran a grocery store, where his mother, Frieda (Frankel) Gold, helped out.
After high school, he took to the road, “living out a fantasy of rebellion from Cleveland,” he wrote in the essay “A Selfish Story.” He lived the bohemian life in New York City and Key West, Fla., and traveled with a circus before enrolling at Columbia University to study philosophy. In 1943, he enlisted in the wartime Army, which trained him as a Russian interpreter but never shipped him overseas.
In Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne on a Fulbright scholarship, Mr. Gold fell in with an expatriate literary crowd that included Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Saul Bellow.
Mr. Gold’s two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Ann, his eldest child, from his first marriage, to Edith Zubrin, he leaves three children from his second marriage, to Melissa Dilworth: Ari, Ethan, and Nina Gold; two brothers, Robert and Eugene; six grandchildren; and four greatgrandchildren.