Michael Gold (April 12, 1894 – May 14, 1967) was the pen-name of Jewish American writer Itzok Isaac Granich. A lifelong communist, Gold was a novelist and literary critic. His semi-autobiographical novel Jews Without Money (1930) was a bestseller. During the 1930s and 1940s, Gold was considered the preeminent author and editor of U.S. proletarian literature. Background Gold was born Itzok Isaac Granich on April 12, 1894, on the Lower East Side of New York City to Romanian Jewish immigrant parents, Chaim Granich and Gittel Schwartz Granich. He had two brothers, Max and George. Career Mike Gold published his first writings under the name Irwin Granich. He reportedly took the pseudonym Michael Gold at the time of the Palmer Raids on radicals in 1919-20 from a Jewish veteran of the American Civil War whom he admired for having fought to "free the slaves." The Masses, a socialist journal edited by Floyd Dell and Max Eastman, published his first pieces in August, 1914. "Three Whose Hatred Killed Them" is a poem about anarchists killed in a Lexington Avenue tenement by their own bomb. Gold praised their "pure intentions". Until his death, he was an ardent supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and of the Soviet Union in all its phases. In 1921-22 Gold and Claude McKay became Executive Editors of Max Eastman's magazine The Liberator. In 1922, Gold wrote: "The Russian Bolsheviks will leave the world a better place than Jesus left it. They will leave it on the threshold of the final victory—the poor will have bread and peace and culture in another generation, not churches and a swarm of lying parasite minister dogs, the legacy of Jesus." In 1925, Gold visited Moscow. In 1926, he was a founding editor of The New Masses, which published leftist works and also set up radical theater groups. Gold served as editor-in-chief from June 1928 until 1934. At both The Liberator and The New Masses, he favored publishing letters, poems and fiction by ordinary workers over works by literary leftists of bourgeois backgrounds. One of the widely noted articles he wrote for The New Masses was "Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot". Here he charged that her works "resemble the monotonous gibberings of paranoiacs in the private wards of asylums ... The literary idiocy of Gertrude Stein only reflects the madness of the whole system of capitalist values. It is part of the