In 1946, Ernest Hemingway visited the New York offices of the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker. The famous, towering author walked up to the receptionist and asked to speak to a columnist who happened to be out at the time. “Ok,” he said, “tell Mike Gold that Ernest Hemingway says he should go fuck himself.”

The best-selling proletarian author, columnist, and critic Mike Gold was, at one point, one of the most famous American radical writers of his time. The author of the best-selling 1930 novel Jews Without Money, Gold was well-known to writers and artists across the world as a champion of proletarian culture. Hemingway, only a decade prior to his combative message, wrote a recommendation for Gold to receive the Guggenheim: “I have known Mike Gold personally since 1928 . . . [and] have been an admirer of his work for many years,” he wrote. But history had changed, and Gold began heavily criticizing middle-class writers who abandoned their formerly radical politics. The Hemingway-Gold conflict was, in many ways, a representation of a political divide that would stretch much wider in the following decades, with those who retreated to liberalism finding shelter from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) purges while the Communists were sentenced to prison, deportation, and poverty.

Gold’s brave proletarian literature garnered him, at one point, fame and notoriety, but later, infamy and ruin. He, along with many other radicals, was buried in the McCarthy era. Only in recent years has his legacy been carefully revived from the dark depths of the blacklists, a resuscitation that’s built on decades of censored academic study. The story of Mike Gold, the most famous American writer you’ve never heard of, is a painfully American chronicle of poverty, fame, authoritarianism, and struggle for a socialist future.