Mike Gold

Michael "Mike" Gold (April 12, 1894 – May 14, 1967) was the pen-name of Jewish American writer Itzok Isaac Granich. A lifelong communist, Gold was a novelist and literary critic. His semi-autobiographical novel Jews Without Money (1930) was a bestseller. During the 1930s and 1940s Gold was considered the preeminent author and editor of U.S. proletarian literature.

Biography

Gold was born Itzok Isaac Granich on April 12, 1894, on the Lower East Side of New York City to Romanian Jewish immigrant parents, Chaim Granich and Gittel Schwartz Granich. He had two brothers, Max and George. Mike Gold published his first writings under the name Irwin Granich. He reportedly took the pseudonym Michael Gold at the time of the Palmer Raids on radicals in 1919-20 from a Jewish Civil War veteran whom he admired for having fought to "free the slaves."

He was once romantically involved with Dorothy Day.

Literary career

The Masses, a socialist journal edited by Floyd Dell and Max Eastman, published his first pieces in August, 1914. "Three Whose Hatred Killed Them" is a poem about anarchists killed in a Lexington Avenue tenement by their own bomb. Gold praised their pure intentions. Until his death he was an ardent supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and of the Soviet Union in all its phases. In 1921-22 Gold and Claude McKay became Executive Editors of Max Eastman's magazine The Liberator. In 1922, Gold wrote: "The Russian Bolsheviks will leave the world a better place than Jesus left it. They will leave it on the threshold of the final victory—the poor will have bread and peace and culture in another generation, not churches and a swarm of lying parasite minister dogs, the legacy of Jesus.

Mike Gold (comics)

Michael Gold (born August 4, 1950) was media coordinator for the defense for the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, is a former Group Editor and Director of Editorial Development at DC Comics, co-founder of First Comics, and the co-founder and director of communication National Runaway Switchboard as well as a disk jockey in Chicago in the 1970s.

Gold launched First Comics in 1983 with a line-up of creators including Frank Brunner, Mike Grell, Howard Chaykin, Joe Staton, Steven Grant, Timothy Truman, and John Ostrander. Among the titles Gold edited were Chaykin's satirical futuristic cop series American Flagg; Ostrander and Truman's GrimJack; Mike Baron & Steve Rude's Nexus; Badger; Jim Starlin's space opera series Dreadstar and Mike Grell's Jon Sable Freelance, which was briefly adapted for TV.

In 1986, Gold left First Comics and returned to DC, where he edited Legends, The Shadow, The Question, Action Comics Weekly, Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters, Blackhawk, and Hawkworld.

In 2005, Gold revived Jon Sable Freelance and GrimJack for IDW Publishing with new miniseries and reprint collections of the First Comics issues, and would also publish a complete collection of Mars.