Herbert Gold

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 four surviving children, six grandchildren and four 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. Gold died at the age of ninety-nine on November 19, 2023. (Biography from author’s website.)