Louis Golding

Who was Louis Golding?

Louis Golding was a British writer, very famous in his time especially for his novels, though he is now largely neglected; he wrote also short stories, essays, fantasies, travel books and poetry.

Born in Manchester into a Ukrainian-Jewish family, Golding was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Queen's College, Oxford. He used his Manchester background and Jewish themes in his novels, the first of which was published while he was still an undergraduate.

His novel Magnolia Street was a bestseller of 1932; it is based on the Hightown area of Manchester, as it was in the 1920s. It features, authentically enough, a street divided into 'gentile' and 'Jewish' sides. It was a 1939 play for Charles B. Cochran in an adaptation by Golding and A. E. Rawlinson, and was also filmed as Magnolia Street Story.

Boucher and McComas named Honey for the Ghost the best supernatural novel of 1949,saying it "begins with infinite leisure but builds to an incomparable climactic terror."

Film screenplays on which Golding collaborated included that of the Paul Robeson film The Proud Valley; this work with Robeson may have led to his later visa problems with the U.S. authorities, The. He also was involved in the script of the 1944 film of his novel Mr. Emmanuel.