Name Harry Golden | Role Writer | |
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Nominations National Book Award for Nonfiction, Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Books Only in America, For Two Cents Plain, Carl Sandburg, The greatest Jewish cit, Travels through Jewish A | ||
Harry Lewis Golden (May 6, 1902 – October 2, 1981) was a Jewish-American writer, newspaper publisher, and a Georgist socialist.
Contents
Life and career
Golden was born Herschel Goldhirsch (or Goldenhurst) in the shtetl Mikulintsy, Ukraine, then part of Austria-Hungary. His mother was Romanian and his father Austrian.
In 1904 his father, Leib Goldhirsch, emigrated to Winnipeg, Manitoba, only to move the family to New York City the next year. For a time Harry worked as a newspaper seller on the Lower East Side, and could remember shouting out headlines about the Leo Frank case, which he later wrote a book about. He became a stockbroker but lost his job in the 1929 crash. Convicted of mail fraud, Golden served five years in a Federal prison at Atlanta, Georgia. In 1941, he moved to Charlotte, where, as a reporter for the Charlotte Labor Journal and The Charlotte Observer, he wrote about and spoke out against racial segregation and the Jim Crow laws of the time.
From 1942 to 1968, Golden published The Carolina Israelite as a forum, not just for his political views (including his satirical "The Vertical Negro Plan", which involved removing the chairs from any to-be-integrated building, since Southern whites didn't mind standing with blacks, only sitting with them), but also observations and reminiscences of his boyhood in New York's Lower East Side. He traveled widely: in 1960 to speak to Jews in West Germany and again to cover the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel for Life. He is referenced in the lyrics to Phil Ochs' song, "Love Me, I'm a Liberal": "You know, I've memorized Lerner and Golden." In December 1973, President Richard M. Nixon gave Mr. Golden a full presidential pardon for his mail fraud conviction.
Calvin Trillin devised the Harry Golden Rule, which states that "in present-day America it's very difficult, when commenting on events of the day, to invent something so bizarre that it might not actually come to pass while your piece is still on the presses."
His books include three collections of essays from the Israelite and a biography of his friend, poet Carl Sandburg. One of those collections, Only in America, was the basis for a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. He also maintained a correspondence with Billy Graham.
Critical attention
Theodore Solotaroff addressed the "Harry Golden phenomenon" in "Harry Golden & the American Audience" in Commentary magazine, March 1961.
Irving Howe compared Philip Roth's early novel Portnoy's Complaint to For 2¢ Plain in a critical review of Roth's novel in Commentary when Complaint was published in 1969.