Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights

This first comprehensive biography of Jewish American writer and humorist Harry Golden (1903–1981) — author of the 1958 national best-seller Only in America — illuminates a remarkable life intertwined with the rise of the civil rights movement, Jewish popular culture, and the sometimes precarious position of Jews in the South and across America during the 1950s.

After recounting Golden’s childhood on New York’s Lower East Side, Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett points to his stint in prison as a you...