- He attended Taft Elementary and Lakewood High School.
- Gold's final publication, a poetry collection entitled Fathers Verses Sons, is scheduled for publication on March 9, 2024, on what would have been his 100th birthday.
- Gold moved to New York City at age 17 after several of his poems had been accepted by New York literary magazines. While there, he studied philosophy at Columbia University and became affiliated with the burgeoning Beat Generation, which resulted in a lifelong friendship with writer Allen Ginsberg.
- In 1946, Gold graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. degree, and M.A. degree in 1948.
- His studies were interrupted when he served in the United States Army from 1943 until 1946, during World War II.
- In a 2017 interview with Washington Post journalist Jeff Weiss, Gold was referred to as a "Beat-adjacent novelist.".
- In 1958 Gold taught English literature at Cornell University, as Vladimir Nabokov's successor.
- His father ran a fruit store in Lakewood, Ohio and later a grocery store. Gold memorialized his hometown in his first book, Birth of a Hero (1951).
- In contrast to many in the Beat Generation, Gold was a resident of San Francisco's more conservative, tourist friendly Russian Hill neighborhood, where he lived for over 60 years.
- Gold won a Fulbright Scholarship (1948-1951) and moved to Paris with his new wife Edith Zubrin, and while in Paris where he finished his first novel. He attended classes at the Sorbonne in Paris during his Fulbright Scholarship. After that, he moved around as he wrote, traveling to Haiti and Detroit, and hitchhiking all over the United States. He finally settled in San Francisco, where he became a fixture in the literary scene.
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