Gold

In January 1848 John Augustus Sutter, 'the first American millionaire' was ruined by one blow of a pickaxe. That blow revealed gold in one of the streams in Sutter's Californian estate, triggering the Gold Rush that brought hordes of greedy miners from every corner of the world to Sutter's vast domain. GOLD, Blaise Cendrars' first novel, is the story of this bankrupt Swiss papermaker who abandoned his family and made his way to America to seek his fortune. From New York he pushed westward, eventually acquiring a huge tract of land of which he was virtually an independent ruler and which was on the point of making him 'the richest man in the world' when the Gold Rush brought disaster. For the last thirty years of his life Sutter tried vainly to get compensation from the US government. He died in 1880, a broken old man. Cendrars spent fifteen years translating Sutter's life-story into fiction, departing (often radically) from the known historical facts to reshape the story of one of the great American pioneers with the pure gold of his own imagination. Published in 1924 GOLD is a work of breathless pace, fantastic humour and soaring invention: an extraordinary story extraordinarily told. In 1936 Cendrars went to Hollywood to work on the movie version, 'Sutter's Gold'.