One can often learn as much about the world by who we are instructed to hate as who we are invited to love. Few writers were subjected to as much Cold War public derision as Mike Gold, once the darling of 1930s red left.

Even in the introductions to books and in public retrospectives, ostensibly convened to honor him, writers brim with contempt. Alfred Kazin’s 1996 preface to Gold’s sole novel Jews Without Money refers to Gold as “primitive,” an “injured soul,” and “not that bright.” A “political propagandist,” Kazin continues, Gold could not think beyond “simple words” and “uncomplicated feelings.” In 1983, Paul Berman felt compelled to remind us Gold “was no genius.”

Gold was aware of such characterizations, writing in his unpublished memoir how “sick” he was of his representation as a “beetle-brow gangster commissar” taking over American literature “by every manner of brutal means.” Before reading a page of Gold, somehow, as a young person, I knew already that he was didactic, boorish, a promoter of formulaic orthodoxy and cartoonish masculinist militancy. “Gold is Schmaltz,” Kazin warns. For a while, I’m embarrassed to say, I believed him.