Salt: A Novel About Love in Manhattan

by Herbert Gold

1964, English edition, Secker & Warburg, London. 318-page hardcover novel. Gold's works over the years have been used in college reading programs. Here, in this novel, he profiles the world of Manhattan, as seen through the eyes of 3 main characters. These are folks who have been elsewhere and come to New York to blend in with all the other "successful" people. None of this makes any of them particularly happy and the story is one of caution; what you're looking for may not be so sweet at the end. Solid characterization, certainly a good look at the people looking for upward mobility in the 1960s.

318 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

San Francisco literary icon Herbert Gold was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1924. After several of his poems were accepted by literary magazines as a teenager, he studied philosophy at Columbia University, where he befriended writers who would define the Beat Generation, from Anaïs Nin to Allen Ginsberg. Gold won a Fulbright fellowship and moved to Paris, where he did graduate studies at the Sorbonne and worked on his first novel Birth of a Hero, published in 1951.

Gold wrote more than thirty books, including the bestsellers Fathers and The Man Who Was Not With It and received many awards, including the Sherwood Anderson Award for Fiction, the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal, and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. He also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, and at Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard.

Gold returned to writing poetry in the last years of his life, creating the book Father Verses Sons, A Correspondence in Poems with his sons, filmmaker Ari Gold and musician Ethan Gold, which was finalized in the weeks before his death, and is now being published by Rare Bird Lit. He also acted in a companion film, Brother Verses Brother coming in late 2024.