Gold, Herbert

Born: 1924

Ohio connection: Birth

Cleveland

Herbert Gold was born in 1924, the eldest of the four sons of Samuel S. Gold and Frieda (Frankel) Gold. When he was in grade school, a teacher, Ruth Collins, told him that he would be a writer, and this impressed the boy so much that he “had to spend years learning to undo [his] eleven-year-old notion of what good writing is.”  He graduated from Lakewood High School in 1942. Afterwards, he attended Columbia University where he’d write for student publications.  From 1943 to 1946 he was in the United States Army and obtained his B.A. in humanities in 1946. Gold continued his studies on a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne). He was a lecturer in philosophy and literature at Western Reserve University, Cleveland, from 1951 to 1953.  He was also a lecturer in English at Wayne State University, Detroit, 1954-56.  Gold writes both fiction and non-fiction where most of his stories take place in California. He has taught as a visiting professor at Cornell University, University of California – Berkeley, Harvard University, Stanford University, and University of California –  Davis. Gold has two children by his first marriage to Edith Zubrin, and three by his second wife, Melissa Dilworth, whom he married in 1968 (divorced 1975).  He resides in San Francisco, California.

Awards:
Fulbright fellow at Sorbonne, University of Paris, 1950; Inter-American Cultural Relations grant to Haiti, 1954; Hudson Review fellow, 1956; Guggenheim fellow and Ohioana Book Award for The Man Who Was Not With-It, 1957; National Institute of Arts and Letters grant in literature, 1958; Longview Foundation Award, 1959; Ford Foundation theatre fellow, 1960; California Literature Medal Award for Fathers: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir, 1968; Commonwealth Club Award for best novel for Family: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir, 1982; L.H.D., Baruch College of the City University of New York, 1988; Sherwood Anderson Prize for fiction, 1989.