Millicent Dillon's Harry Gold: A Novel (2000) focuses on Rosenberg espionage case, particularly on the courier who transmitted the information. The eldest child of poor Russian-Jewish immigrants, Harry Gold comes of age in the Great Depression. Although he excelled in science, he has to go to work right after high school to support his parents and siblings. Eventually he attends college in the evening, graduating from Xavier University with a degree in chemical engineering. Like many people suffering in the depths of the depression, he concludes that capitalism is in its death throes and communism the best hope for a more equitable society. But he has no use for the Communist Party--he never joins it--with its endless wrangling and hairsplitting, theoretical discussions.

As presented in the novel, Harry is a simple man, whose principal motive for spying is a desire to help the people of Russia, like his parents. He is a man doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, a man with a very weak sense of self-esteem, thus easily persuaded to do someone else's bidding. As a recruiter of other spies, he is clumsy and inept, but he is somewhat more effective as a courier, although he comes to hate the drab, boring, lonely life it generates. His dislike changes somewhat when he is assigned to Klaus Fuchs, for whom he has immense respect as a distinguished physicist and refugee from Nazi Germany. But the meetings with Fuchs are very few, though important.

When the news of the arrest of Klaus Fuchs breaks, Harry assumes that his days are numbered. Offered the opportunity to escape to the Soviet Union, he realizes that he is an American at heart. Interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and stalling for one or two sessions, he suddenly confesses, finally unburdening himself of his secret life and the guilt it engendered. At his trial, his behavior impresses his lawyer, John D. Hamilton, who, in his summary, describes Gold as "the most extraordinarily selfless person I have ever met in my life." Gold finds both peace and purpose in prison, where he trains other inmates as medical technicians and performs original chemical research for the U.S. Health Service. Paroled in 1966, he becomes chief biochemist at Philadelphia's John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital, where he serves until his death in 1972.

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