SOURCE: “Herbert Gold: A Boy of Early Autumn,” in Studies in American Jewish Literature, Vol. 10, No. 2, Fall, 1991, pp. 136–71.

In the following interview, originally conducted on December 16, 1986, Gold discusses a variety of subjects, including his writing, teaching, marriage, and Judaism.

The interview is, we know, a profile, a sketch, or a close-up. It is, furthermore, as Alfred Kazin once remarked, not only our “way of understanding the personality but also his exceptionality.” The writer, for one, is thus given the opportunity to document that “exceptionality” himself. Because part of that “exceptionality” is the writer's heightened degree of himself, a sense of his particular gift or “daemon,” we view “with increasing satisfaction the biographical close-up.” Ours is a “tendency to identify the power of art with the uniqueness of personality.”

One such unique personality is the novelist Herbert Gold. Slowly approaching his mid-sixties, the early autumn of his life, Herbert...