Not Dead Yet: A Feisty Bohemian Explores the Art of Growing Old

by Herbert Gold

An upbeat memoir to savor and admire, Still Alive! proves that in your later years you can still be going strong . . . and having fun! “Old age is a shipwreck,” Charles de Gaulle once observed. Not so, says Herb Gold in this lively, often hilarious memoir of his first seven decades. He is clearly enjoying every moment to its fullest. This is a book about how time overtakes us, how reminiscence, loss, hope, pain, success, failure-the lifelong accumulation of dreams and reality-crowd about us with every passing day. Combining a fascinating selection of people, places, and key events from a long life into the alembic of his ever-fertile imagination, Gold has distilled gold from his uncanny ability to recall conversations, anecdotes, atmosphere, and telling detail. By turns wickedly funny (“Prostate surgeries and hysterectomies are not immediately visible at art gallery openings.”) and touching (“It’s harder to learn how to laugh alone.”), Still Alive!, in this age of overheated memoirs, will surely find its way to a grateful audience both young and young at heart.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

234 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 1, 2011

About the author

San Francisco literary icon Herbert Gold was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1924. After several of his poems were accepted by literary magazines as a teenager, he studied philosophy at Columbia University, where he befriended writers who would define the Beat Generation, from Anaïs Nin to Allen Ginsberg. Gold won a Fulbright fellowship and moved to Paris, where he did graduate studies at the Sorbonne and worked on his first novel Birth of a Hero, published in 1951.

Gold wrote more than thirty books, including the bestsellers Fathers and The Man Who Was Not With It and received many awards, including the Sherwood Anderson Award for Fiction, the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal, and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. He also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, and at Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard.

Gold returned to writing poetry in the last years of his life, creating the book Father Verses Sons, A Correspondence in Poems with his sons, filmmaker Ari Gold and musician Ethan Gold, which was finalized in the weeks before his death, and is now being published by Rare Bird Lit. He also acted in a companion film, Brother Verses Brother coming in late 2024.