Gerald Jay Goldberg

Who is Gerald Jay Goldberg?

Gerald Jay Goldberg is an American author. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, a novelist, critic, and author of a nonfiction study of the network news and a biography of Ted Turner.

Goldberg’s best-known work is The Lynching of Orin Newfield, a powerful novel about a “communal murder ... in a small farming town in Vermont.” His novels and short stories—ranging widely in setting, subject, and technique—are intense, witty, and elegantly crafted. Reviewers have compared his crisp prose and caustic humor to Nathanael West, Donald Barthelme, Joseph Heller and Thomas McGuane. Saul Bellow’s description of McGuane as "a language star" is, in fact, an apt description for Goldberg as well. His command of metaphor and detail is remarkable, each sentence precisely, relentlessly original. "His prose sparkles", The New York Times wrote, "with well-observed idiosyncrasies." The Chicago Sun-Times ranked Goldberg’s 126 Days of Continuous Sunshine with Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 for its evocation of “California insanity.” The Los Angeles Herald Examiner praised Heart Payments for its “wonderful textured evocation of the L.A. art scene of the late 1960s.” Of The Lynching of Orin Newfield, The New Yorker concluded: “The tension and clarity of Mr. Goldberg’s writing leave us no choice but to follow his raging anti-hero’s story from the comparatively mild beginning to the thundering finish.”