He was friends with Allen Ginsburg but disliked Jack Kerouac, who "returned the favor."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Gold
(includes booklist - he wrote about 20 novels)

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/20/books/herbert-gold-dead.html
(includes two book covers and a poem)

Herbert Gold, Postwar Novelist of Love and Marriage, Dies at 99

He emerged in the 1950s as a promising young writer exploring the emotional lives of ordinary men and women and the complexities of Jewish identity in America.

By William Grimes
Nov. 20, 2023

Herbert Gold, a novelist whose verbal inventiveness and keen eye for the complicated emotional transactions of love and marriage established him as one of the most promising of the young American writers to emerge after World War II, died on Sunday at his home in San Francisco. He was 99.

His death was confirmed on Monday by his daughter Ann Gold Buscho.

Born in Ohio, Mr. Gold brought a Midwestern skepticism and a deflating sense of humor to his tales of ordinary men and women trying to gain a foothold in the slippery terrain of romance — or, like him, struggling to connect the world of their Jewish immigrant parents with the realities of American life.

He was hard to categorize, and perhaps for that reason never had the kind of celebrated career that peers like Norman Mailer and Philip Roth enjoyed and that his early books seemed to augur. “Herbert Gold always seems on the verge of writing the big one,” Newsweek wrote in 1967.

But if the big one never arrived, Mr. Gold did produce, with regularity, a distinctive brand of fiction and journalism.

His first novel, “The Birth of a Hero” (1951), and the extravagantly praised “The Man Who Was Not With It” (1956) showed a hipster sensibility in their treatment of heroes working toward self-realization in a square American world. In “Salt” (1963), he turned a cold, knowing eye on love and ambition in the self-contained worlds of Madison Avenue and Wall Street.

The lurid carnival setting of “The Man Who Was Not With It” and Mr. Gold’s rich use of carny slang — some of it his own invention — offered a compelling picture of an alternative, underground America. But Mr. Gold, characteristically, distanced himself from the hipster label.

“If I can ever find the main office of the Beat Generation, I plan to hand in my resignation,” he once said, although he analyzed the Beats and the 1960s counterculture shrewdly in “Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love, and Strong Coffee Meet” (1993)...

(snip)

https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/books/herb-gold-san-francisco-author-obituary-17815422
(this one's LONG and good)

Excerpts:

....Another adventure was ahead of him, because after his 18th birthday, he left Columbia to join the Army.

His first choice was to be a fighter pilot, but poor vision got him washed out of the Army Air Corps. Instead he was trained in military intelligence and was sent to Cornell for a year to study Russian.

The concept for his unit was to parachute behind Soviet lines and then teach Red Army soldiers how to use American equipment that had been delivered. Gold never forgot how to say “I’m an American soldier and I am your friend.” He made one jump in training, but he never saw combat. Just five from his cohort were dropped, and four of them were killed.

....Gold ended up with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy, in 1948. Then he got a two-year Fulbright fellowship to the Sorbonne in Paris.

“I was supposed to be studying for a doctorate,” he said. “But I wrote a novel instead.” He paid 40 cents a night for a room without a bath, which was a slight hardship on his wife, Edith Zubrin, whom he brought with him from Columbia. They lived on the Left Bank. Down the hall lived James Baldwin.

....Though they were never close, by geography, both daughters from his first marriage, Ann and Judy, attended Stanford University to be near him. Their memories of the apartment go back to hot chocolate served while sitting on the floor because there was no table. Even then “he declined everything modern,’’ recalled daughter Ann Buscho, now a clinical psychologist. ‘I don’t think he even had a toaster.’

Gold always denied being a Luddite and emphasized his use of a landline. His use of a typewriter was pragmatic.

“For me, writing is an act of sculpture,” he said. “I get mad at the words I put on the page and I can rip the page out. I can kick it when I’m annoyed.”...
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https://www.kirkusreviews.com/search/books/?q=herbert%20gold&sf=t
(many Kirkus reviews)

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/107476.Herbert_Gold

Correction - that's "Ginsberg."