A lifelong communist, Gold was a novelist, journalist, magazine editor, newspaper columnist, playwright, and literary critic.

Gold was born Itzhok Isaak Granich on April 12, 1893[1][2] on Delancey Street in the Lower East Side of New York City.

When Chaim's small business failed and he became ill, the twelve-year-old Itzhok was forced, after a half year of high school, into a series of grinding jobs: errand boy in garment factories, shipping clerk, printer's assistant, night porter, driver's helper for the Adams Express Company, and filing clerk for the Southern Pacific Railroad.

"[9] Itzhok Granich began his writing career by submitting poems and articles to The Masses, edited by Floyd Dell and Max Eastman.

Shortly after the 1919-20 Palmer Raids on radicals, he switched to Michael Gold, reportedly because it was the name of a Jewish Civil War veteran and abolitionist whom he admired for having fought to "free the slaves".

The poem opens with the lines: "These wild, bitter men, whose iron hatred burst too soon, / Judge them not harshly, O comrades.

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.

In 1926, Gold and Joseph Freeman co-founded New Masses magazine, which featured leftist literature, satirical cartoons, and journalistic pieces, and also helped establish radical theater groups.

"[18] The essay was, according to Walter Rideout, "the first attempt in America to formulate a definition for what was to become the most important critical term among radical literary groups of the early thirties—'proletarian literature.

'"[19] At the end of the decade, in the January 1929 issue of New Masses, Gold's call to action "Go Left, Young Writers!"

[20] In his editorial decisions at The Liberator and New Masses, Gold preferred journalism, poems, letters, and short stories by ordinary workers over the writings of literary leftists from bourgeois backgrounds.

In a New Masses article entitled "Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot", he charged that her works "resemble the monotonous gibberings of paranoiacs in the private wards of asylums ...

[25] In his "Author's Note" to the novel (added in the 1935 reprint), Gold wrote, "I have told in my book a tale of Jewish poverty in one ghetto, that of New York.

"[26] Critic Richard Tuerk called Jews Without Money "the story of the education of a radical" and "a carefully worked, unified piece of art.

Produced by the Federal Theatre Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the play contains scenes from Brown's life.

"[34] As a literary critic, Gold fiercely denounced left-wing authors who he believed had deviated from the Communist Party line.

[35][14] Among those he denounced were Albert Maltz, John Howard Lawson,[36][37] and the "renegade" Ernest Hemingway, who while never a Communist had been sympathetic to leftist causes but came under fire for his writing on the Spanish Civil War in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

"[28] Due to sharply declining circulation, The Daily Worker laid him off and he had to resort to odd jobs, including "in a print shop, at a summer camp, and as a janitor.