ABSTRACT
Harry Lewis Golden was born Herschel Goldhirsch, on May 6, 1902, in the Galician village of Mikulincz, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His mother, Anna Klein, was the daughter of a Rumanian grain merchant; his father, Leib Goldhurst, was a teacher, writer and auxiliary cantor. Later, in America, Leib writes the first sports story for a foreign-language newspaper. Harry married Genevieve Gallagher, Clara's stenographer, in 1926, and the couple moved to Larchmont, New York and later to River Plaza, New Jersey. They had four children; three of the boys would become writers or academics and aid Harry as editors or researchers. Harry Goldhurst had a short-lived, disastrous career as an independent broker which led to his bankruptcy, a 1929 trial for mail fraud, and a prison term of three years and nine months. The general public best knew Harry Golden from his 17 books, beginning with Only in America in 1958.
