Biography: An American novelist who studied philosophy at Columbia University. While there, he fell in with the burgeoning Beat Generation and befriended many writers, including Anaïs Nin and Allen Ginsberg. Gold won a Fulbright fellowship and moved to Paris in his early twenties, where he attended graduate school and worked on his first novel, Birth of a Hero, published in 1951. Since then Gold has written more than thirty books and received several awards.