SLSL Intro "Emerging Voices"

[Dave Monroe]

"... emerging voices like those of Herbert Gold and
Philip Roth" (SL, "Intro," p. 7)

Herbert Gold

"In form Gold is conventional and traditional,
favoring the energetic and self-revealing style of
colloquial first-person narratives. His chief
experimentation is with content and style. A
practitioner of both journalism and fiction, Gold sees
a thin line separating their material and treatment.
'The line between parajournalism and fiction is
dissolving…I think there will always be distinction
between an imaginative reconstruction of experience
and an imaginative projection of vivid experience. The
second is still going to be called journalism and the
first still called a novel or a story. But the line
separating them is blurred.'"

[...]

"As a stylist Gold is both a skillful artist and a
classic and compelling storyteller. 'I like to think
of storytelling as an oral art. I am telling a story
to people on the other side of the fire,' and that is
Gold's most comfortable position--intimate and
animated with his material. Early linked with the oral
style of Jack Kerouac's beat prose, Gold has proven
himself to be more versatile and entertaining as he
achieves a kind of method-prose acting, becoming and
revealing his narrators at the same time."

http://www.oplin.lib.oh.us/products/ohioana/hgold/belief.html

Herbert Gold's Bibliography

http://www.oplin.lib.oh.us/products/ohioana/hgold/GOLDBIBLIO.HTML

Hip, Cool, Beat—and Frantic

"The hipster-writer is a perennial perverse bar
mitzvah boy, proudly announcing: 'Today I am a madman.
Now give me the fountain pen.' The frozen thugs
gathered west of Sheridan Square or in the hopped-up
cars do not bother with talk. That’s why they say
'man' to everybody—-they can’t remember anybody’s
name. But Ginsberg and Kerouac are frantic. They care
too much, and they care aloud. 'I’m hungry, I’m
starving, let’s eat right now!' That they care mostly
for themselves is a sign of adolescence, but at least
they care for something, and it’s a beginning. The
hipster is past caring. He is the criminal with no
motivation in hunger, the delinquent with no zest, the
gang follower with no love of the gang; i.e., the
worker without ambition or pleasure in work, the
youngster with undescended passions, the organization
man with sloanwilsonian gregory-peckerism in his cold,
cold heart."

--Herbert Gold, review of On the Road, by Jack
Kerouac, November 16, 1957 in the Nation magazine

http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/gold.html

The Last Poet: An appreciation of Allen Ginsberg by
Herbert Gold 

http://www.salon.com/april97/ginsberg970416.html

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