"If America had the literary culture it ought to have,
every city would have a writer like Herbert Gold."
- Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Obituaries:
New York Times
Washington Post
San Francisco Chronicle
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San Francisco literary icon Herbert Gold was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1924. After several of his poems were accepted by literary magazines as a teenager, he studied philosophy at Columbia University, where he befriended writers who would define the Beat Generation, from Anaïs Nin to Allen Ginsberg. Gold won a Fulbright fellowship and moved to Paris, where he did graduate studies at the Sorbonne and worked on his first novel, Birth of a Hero, published in 1951. Gold wrote more than thirty books, including the bestsellers Fathers and The Man Who Was Not With It and received many awards, including the Sherwood Anderson Award for Fiction, the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal, and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. He also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, and at Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. He has 4 surviving children, 6 grandchildren and 4 great grandchildren, and returned to writing poetry in the final years of his life, producing the book “Father Verses Sons, A Correspondence in Poems,” to be released on what would have been his 100th birthday.
Herbert Gold was profiled extensively in the Washington Post's 2017 series "Driving the Beat Road."
A Brief Autobiography
Herbert Gold: “I started writing poetry in Cleveland, the Paris of Northeastern Ohio, but left for Columbia College in New York, Paris in France, Port-au-Prince in Haiti, not counting various dusty and harassed enclaves in downtown World War 2. Somehow I got to writing prose, confining my poetry to folders which will in due course be excavated by my children. Along the way, I’ve published approximately 20 novels and collections of stories (who’s counting?) and maybe 6 or 8 nonfiction books (I’m not a mathematician). I’ve temporarily taught at Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, UC-Berkeley and UC-Davis, but didn’t want to depart San Francisco, my temporary residence for more than 55 years. I’ve had 2 wives and 5 children (this is an accurate count). Isn’t that enough bio? There could be more….”
Herbert Gold’s Family
Herbert Gold has two brothers, Eugene and Robert, and five children: psychiatrist Ann Buscho, yoga teacher Nina Gold, filmmaker Ari Gold, and musician Ethan Gold. His daughter Judy Gold died a few years ago. His six grandchildren include herbalist Sarah Buscho.