Gerald Jay Goldberg (December 30, 1929 - June 2, 2020) was an American author. He was a professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he taught English and American literature and Creative Writing. An acclaimed novelist, he was also a critic and the author (with Robert Goldberg) of a nonfiction study of the network news and a biography of Ted Turner. Literary career Goldberg’s best-known work, The Lynching of Orin Newfield, is a powerful novel about a “communal murder ... in a small farming town in Vermont.” His novels and short stories—ranging widely in setting, subject, and technique—were intense, witty, and elegantly crafted. Reviewers compared his crisp prose and caustic humor to Nathanael West, Donald Barthelme, Joseph Heller and Thomas McGuane. Saul Bellow’s description of McGuane as "a language star" is, in fact, an apt description for Goldberg as well. His command of metaphor and detail (like McGuane’s) was remarkable, each sentence precisely, relentlessly original. "His prose sparkles," The New York Times wrote, "with well-observed idiosyncrasies." The Chicago Sun-Times ranked Goldberg’s 126 Days of Continuous Sunshine with Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 for its evocation of “California insanity.” The Los Angeles Herald Examiner praised Heart Payments for its “wonderful textured evocation of the L.A. art scene of the late 1960s.” Writing in Art News magazine's 100th Anniversary Issue, art critic Peter Plagens called Heart Payments "the best novel about an artist I've ever read." Of The Lynching of Orin Newfield, The New Yorker concluded: “The tension and clarity of Mr. Goldberg’s writing leave us no choice but to follow his raging anti-hero’s story from the comparatively mild beginning to the thundering finish.” In 2012, Goldberg began a series of stylish thrillers under the nom de plume of Gerald Jay. Set in France, they feature Inspector Paul Mazarelle, a detective called "charming" and "indomitable" by Publishers Weekly. The first work in the series, The Paris Directive, was referred to by Christopher Reich as a "beguiling, atmospheric, and entirely entertaining novel." The Mystery Tribune called Gerald Jay "truly a master in elegant use of language and a bright star in the world of crime fiction." The second installment in the series, The Hanged Man's Tale, is scheduled for publication at the beginning of December, 2021. There was considerable Hollywood interest in Orin Newfield, following its publication in 1970. Though never produced, the novel was optioned by Buck