Throughout the 1920s Gold worked on his only novel, "Jews Without Money", a fictionalized autobiography about growing up in the impoverished world of the Lower East Side. Published in 1930, shortly after the onset of the Great Depression, it was an immediate success and went through many print-runs in its first years and was translated into over 14 languages. It became a prototype for the American proletarian novel. In his "Author's Note" to the novel, Gold wrote, "I have told in my book a tale of Jewish poverty in one ghetto, that of New York. The same story can be of a hundred other ghettoes scattered over all the world. For centuries the Jew has lived in this universal ghetto." The popularity of "Jews Without Money" made Gold a national figure and cultural commissar of the Communist Party. He was a daily columnist for its paper, the "Daily Worker", until his death. Gold himself was fond of repeating a quote from the novel: "O workers' Revolution!... You are the true Messiah!"