Herbert Gold was born on March 9, 1924, in the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood, Ohio, to a Russian Jewish family.
While there, he studied philosophy at Columbia University and became affiliated with the burgeoning Beat Generation, which resulted in a lifelong friendship with writer Allen Ginsberg.
His studies were interrupted when he served in the United States Army from 1943 until 1946, during World War II.
Despite being intertwined with the literary history of San Francisco which greatly defined the Beat Generation, Gold did not consider himself to have ever been a member of this group of writers.
[7][8] In a 2017 interview with Washington Post journalist Jeff Weiss, Gold was referred to as a "Beat-adjacent novelist.
[12] In contrast to many in the Beat Generation, Gold was a resident of San Francisco's more conservative, tourist-friendly Russian Hill neighborhood, where he lived in the same apartment for over 60 years.