Harry Golden (né Chaim Goldhirsch) grew up on New York’s Lower East Side and spent three years in prison for swindling investors. Not long after his release, he moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where he took on a new name, a new persona, and a new career as a journalist and anti-segregation activist. Edward Kosner writes:
Golden played the maverick—the refugee New Yorker transplanted in the cornpone South, polemic journalist, son of a Hebrew scholar [but] married to a Roman Catholic, champion of the oppressed, union man, cigar-chomping, bourbon-slugging pal of intellectuals and politicians. Actually, he was a Kennedy-era liberal, more committed to civil rights than the Kennedy administration but in sync with Democratic cold-war foreign policy. Indeed, Golden’s prime—the years from the publication of his best-selling Only in America in 1958 to the election of Richard Nixon a decade later—coincides with the postwar Democratic ascendancy that died in the jungles of Vietnam. . . .
Starting in 1944, Golden filled the plain columns of the Carolina Israelite with short essays, editorials, and reminiscences of growing up poor in a pious family on the Lower East Side. Over the years, he repurposed the stuff into a series of books, beginning with Only in America, which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year and made him enough money to pay off many of his old debts. More than a dozen other books followed, including an autobiography and studies of Jewish peddlers and the case of Leo Frank, the Jewish factory manager who was accused of murdering a young woman and lynched by a white mob in Marietta, Georgia in 1915. He wrote for important magazines, too, including Life, Esquire, the Nation, and Commentary. All that exposure led to lucrative work on the side as a lecturer and frequent appearances on the Tonight Show couch, with Jack Paar and then Johnny Carson.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-streets-are-paved-with-golden/