Bernard Malamud

Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) was born of Russian Jewish immigrant parents and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Erasmus Hall High School, City College (BA, 1936), and then Columbia University. A high school teacher in New York City in the 1940s, he was hired by Oregon State College (today OSU) in 1949 to teach freshman composition. From 1961 to 1966, already an acclaimed writer, he taught creative writing at Bennington College, Vermont. The long Oregon decade (1949–1961) produced his first three novels, and some of his most acclaimed short fiction—a career that granted him a significant place in the American postwar literary canon, along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth often labeled as a “Jewish American” generation. Malamud was critically acclaimed for his stylistic mastery of language infused with poetic images, the contrast of American English and Yiddish undertones, and his rendering of understated immigrant characters, often failing Jews who embody a humanist ethos or a mythical self-transcendence. Between 1952 and 1982, Malamud published seven novels and four volumes of stories, with a remarkably broad fictional range, both in terms of genre and themes. They include romance, social realism, historical fiction and fantasy, broaching subjects as diverse as American mythmaking (The Natural [1952]), urban immigrant realities (The Assistant [1957]), a campus romance (A New Life [1961]), historical anti-Semitism (The Fixer [1966], a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner), Black-Jewish relations (The Tenants [1971]), a writerly self-reflection (Dubin’s Lives [1979]), and a post-apocalyptic dystopia (God’s Grace [1982]). The stories in the volumes The Magic Barrel (1958, a National Book Award winner) and Idiots First (1963), for most readers and critics his greatest achievement, often focus on the hardships of store life, based on his immigrant father, and feature relationships between characters who redeem each other or discover their shared humanity. These often involve folk-tale, parable-like elements from Yiddish tradition, and some of the most memorable employ magical realism or the supernatural. From the mid-1960s, Malamud’s fiction became bleaker, more despairing and solipsistic, as in the novels The Tenants (1971) and God’s Grace (1982), and the stories in Rembrandt’s Hat (1974). Malamud also reflected his Italian experience (1956–1957, on a Rockefeller Grant) in eleven stories set in Italy, six of which feature the protagonist Fidelman. These were collected as the episodic novel Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (1969). At his death in 1986, Malamud was starting work on a new novel, published in draft form in the posthumous volume The People and Uncollected Stories (1989).