Michael Gold was born Itzok Granich to impoverished Jewish immigrant parents on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The major themes of his long career in American literary radicalism derive from these origins. These themes appear most prominently in his major work, the fictionalized autobiography, Jews Without Money (1930), but also in his voluminous poetry, short fiction, dramas, literary criticism, and journalism. His passionate desire to be a writer, mixed with rage at the insult of poverty, led him to become one of the first, most notorious, and most persistent theorists of proletarian literature in the United States. In public school, the boy adopted or was given Irwin for a Christian name, and his earliest writing appeared under the name Irwin Granich. During the Red Scare of 1919-1920, he took Michael Gold for a protective pseudonym. He borrowed the name from a Civil War veteran whom he admired, and it stuck...