Harry Gold

by Millicent Dillon

In casting Gold's story as a novel, Dillon creates a gripping narrative from the true events of political life in America from the thirties through the McCarthy era, from Gold's recruitment to his training in tradecraft to his role in Julius Rosenberg's and Klaus Fuchs's atomic espionage at Los Alamos. The result is a novel with the psychological depth of Graham Greene's The Third Man, the taut pacing of All the President' s Men, and the moral poignancy of Phillip Roth's I Married A Communist.

Genres: Fiction, Espionage, Novels

320 pages, Hardcover

First published April 3, 2000

About the author

Millicent Dillon was an American writer. She was born in New York City and studied physics at Hunter College. She also worked variously at Princeton University, Standard Oil Company, Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft, and Northrop Aircraft. In 1965, at the age of 40, Dillon enrolled in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University. Subsequently, she taught at Foothill College in Los Altos, California. She also worked at Stanford University for nearly a decade.
Millicent became a full-time writer in 1983. She is best known for her scholarly works on the American writers Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles. These include a couple of biographies and a collection of letters, as well as The Viking Portable Paul and Jane Bowles (1994) which Dillon edited. Besides these, she also wrote short stories, novels, and plays. Her novel Harry Gold (2000) was nominated for the PEN Faulkner Award. She won five O. Henry awards and also received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Dillon is the mother of the author Wendy Lesser.

Reviews

[Jeanny Ragosta · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first, I found the story somewhat monotonous but it came out with an unexpected twist. Didn't expect that this guy actually lived the life for real.

[Daniel P Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harry Gold

A novel soberly told in minimalist tradition just as Harry lived his seemingly simple life. Few twists and turns but a story I’ll remember.

[Olivier Lepetit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actually this turned out to be better than I imagined. The author is trying to romance the life of Harry Gold, the courier who passed on the secrets of the Atomic bomb to the Russians. She does a superb job in getting the reader to care for this selfless man, as if he told the story himself.

[Marguerite Hargreaves · Rating 1 out of 5]

Really dull. Espionage and war are made tedious here, and the main character flat. I don't know how this won the approval of the New York Times.