signs of doom that are written largely everywhere on the walls of bourgeois society." In "Proletarian Realism" (1930), Gold said of Marcel Proust: "The worst example and the best of what we do not want to do is the spectacle of Proust, master-masturbator of the bourgeois literature." He also assailed the Pulitzer Prize winner Thornton Wilder in equally vitriolic terms. Throughout the 1920s Gold worked on his only novel, Jews Without Money, a fictionalized autobiography about growing up in the impoverished world of the Lower East Side. Published in 1930, shortly after the onset of the Great Depression, it was an immediate success and went through many print-runs in its first years and was translated into over 14 languages. It became a prototype for the American proletarian novel. In his Author's Note to the novel, Gold wrote, "I have told in my book a tale of Jewish poverty in one ghetto, that of New York. The same story can be of a hundred other ghettoes scattered over all the world. For centuries the Jew has lived in this universal ghetto." The popularity of Jews Without Money made Gold a national figure and cultural commissar of the Communist Party. He was a daily columnist for its paper, the Daily Worker, until his death. Gold himself was fond of repeating a quote from the novel: "O workers' Revolution!... You are the true Messiah!" Critic Richard Tuerk has described Jews Without Money as being "the story of the education of a radical", and a "carefully worked, unified piece of work." The American Communist and labor-organizer Fred Beal described Gold in Moscow in the early thirties as "sentimental revolutionist", anxious "to impress people with his 'proletarian' childhood", and with an intense destestation for liberals. As a critic, Gold fiercely denounced left-wing authors who he believed had deviated from the Communist Party line. Among those Gold denounced were screenwriter Albert Maltz and "renegade" Ernest Hemingway, who while never a Communist had been sympathetic to leftist causes but came under fire by some for his writing on the Spanish Civil War in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway responded with "Go tell Mike Gold, Ernest Hemingway says he should go fuck himself." Personal life and death Gold was once romantically involved with Dorothy Day. Gold died in Terra Linda, California, on May 14, 1967, from complications following a stroke. He was 73 years old. Legacy Gold's