Herbert Gold, a prolific novelist whose taut, keenly observed and sometimes sharply satirical works about love, heartache and the Jewish experience in postwar America brought him critical ovations but only fleeting fame, died Nov. 19 at his apartment in San Francisco. He was 99.
His son, filmmaker Ari Gold, confirmed his death but did not give a cause.
Mr. Gold, who into his late 90s was still pecking sentences on his Royal typewriter, was the last writer standing among his mentors and friends, a motley crew of literary giants including Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.
Like many of his contemporaries, Mr. Gold’s literary career began with a sojourn to Paris, where he worked on his first novel in a tiny apartment next door to James Baldwin. One afternoon, Mr. Gold later recalled, “this little bug-eyed” man dropped by the building looking for a Dutch painter.
“Who are you?” Mr. Gold said.
The man replied, “Picasso.”
In Paris, Mr. Gold became friends with Bellow, who liked his first novel and successfully lobbied his publisher, Viking Press, to issue it. “Birth of a Hero,” published in 1951, tells the story of Reuben Flair, a Midwestern accountant navigating a love triangle.
“Gold writes well,” a New York Times reviewer said. “His style is rich and rolling, with intoned rhythms and phrasing. One feels the surge of a novelist’s talent in the observations of human behavior under stress.”
The same year, Mr. Gold published “The Heart of the Artichoke,” a widely anthologized, autobiographical short story about a boy rebelling against his father, a fruit and vegetable store owner. Several other works followed, including “The Man Who Was Not With It” (1956), about a drug-addled carnival worker, and “Salt” (1963), about three New Yorkers bumbling their way through Greenwich Village.
Reviewing “Salt,” the Times said, “It gives us, as does Saul Bellow’s ‘The Adventures of Augie March’ and Walker Percy’s ‘The Moviegoer,’ a look at modern man, tumbling through space and time, desperately reaching to possess the ultimately unpossessables of love and purpose.”
As his piles of positive reviews grew, royalty dollars did not — a case of the “writers’ writer” curse that appeared to shift in 1966 when Mr. Gold published the autobiographical novel “Fathers: A Novel in Form of a Memoir,” about a Russian Jewish immigrant grocer and his son — a son that turns aside his father.
“Fathers” was a bestseller. Mr. Gold’s picture was on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Time, Newsweek and the Saturday Review. “I took a plane to New York and was recognized by the stewardesses,” he said in a 1974 interview with the Transatlantic Review. “I was given great attention, I was recognized at the airport, I was an instant celebrity.”
Two weeks later, “It was all over,” Mr. Gold said. “Several new issues of Time had come out. Several issues of Newsweek had come and gone. There were new celebrities.”
He did not become a towering figure of literature like Bellow, Mailer or Philip Roth, probably owing, critics thought, to his disinterest in writing muscular, big-idea novels about America. Mr. Gold, who covered wars and wrote several books of nonfiction in between works of fiction, was a writer who chronicled the world without defining it.
“Gold was neither as successful nor as famous as many of the Jewish American writers of his generation, but he was no slouch,” Robert Kaiser, a friend of Mr. Gold and former Washington Post managing editor, wrote in the Paris Review. “He’s left his mark on twentieth-century American literature, even if he rarely made a splash, and has lived as a writer for nearly seven decades, outliving many of his contemporaries.”
Herbert Gold was born in Lakewood, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, on March 9, 1924. His father, a Ukrainian immigrant, owned a grocery store, and his mother sometimes worked there.
Cleveland had a large Jewish population; Lakewood did not.
“I grew up in a terribly antisemitic community,” he told the Jewish News of Northern California. “People wanted to see my horns or my cloven hoof. People would chase me home from school. People betrayed me.”
He was editor of his high school newspaper. At 17, he moved to New York, where he wrote poetry and befriended Ginsberg, then a key figure in the burgeoning Beat movement. He enrolled at Columbia University, where he received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in philosophy. His education was disrupted by three years of Army service during World War II.
In 1948, he won a Fulbright fellowship to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he worked on his first novel, about an accountant.
“I would ride my bike and think about the French Resistance,” Mr. Gold told the Paris Review. “In 1949, the war was still fresh, there were trials of Nazi collaborators on the front page of the paper every day, and I got the notion of writing a novel about an ordinary accountant in Lakewood, Ohio, who had the spirit of a French resistant.”
After Paris, Mr. Gold bounced around — to Detroit, back to New York and eventually, in 1960, to San Francisco, where he lived in a rent-controlled apartment on Russian Hill for decades. (His son Ari noted the apartment was likely worth many multiples more than his father’s rent of less than $700.)
Mr. Gold’s marriages to Edith Zubrin in 1948 and Melissa Dilworth in 1968 ended in divorce.
Survivors include Ann Gold Buscho, a daughter from his first marriage; three children from his second marriage, Ari, Ethan and Nina Gold; two brothers; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Judith Gold, a daughter from his first marriage, died in 2016.
Mr. Gold published nearly 40 books during his career. He also taught at universities including Cornell, where Nabokov handpicked him as his successor.
He never got around to using an electric typewriter, let alone a computer.
“Writing for me seems to be an act of sculpture in which the pen is a brush, the typewriter a hammer, the scissors an awl, and the smells and stickiness and reflections of erasers, Scotch tape, paste and staples are all a part of the procedure,” he wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle. “I need to express disgust by ripping a sheet of paper — one more tree gone — out of the machine, balling it up, bouncing it against the wall.”