Harry Golden Biography With Charlotte Atkins Library Archival Collections
By DAWN SCHMITZ
Harry Golden: Bestselling Author, Raconteur, and Advocate for Civil Rights with His Irreverent Newspaper is a new online mini-biography in which Golden’s compelling life story is accompanied by archival materials from the collections at Atkins Library.
Written by Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, the narrative is based on the research for her full-length biography Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights (The University of North Carolina Press, 2015; 2018; Audible; Braille.) In her lively prose, Hartnett describes how a “middle-aged felon; a stout, gravelly-voiced, cigar-smoking Jewish raconteur – and no one’s idea of a hero” managed to help shape America’s view of the civil rights movement over three decades with his one-man newspaper, several best-selling books, television appearances, and speeches.
The site features photographs of Golden throughout his life, letters and photographs documenting his connections with notable figures, columns from the Carolina Israelite, and an audio clip of him giving a humorous account of being “A Lone Jew in a Small Southern Town.”
The site is built on Scalar, a free, open source authoring and publishing platform designed for writing long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar is one of the resources featured in Atkins library’s Digital Humanities guide.