Bernard Malamud

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Bernard Malamud (April 26, 1914 March 18, 1986) was

an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bernard Malamud
Bellow and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known
American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball
novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring
Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer (also filmed),
about antisemitism in Tsarist Russia, won both the National
Book Award[1] and the Pulitzer Prize.[2]

Contents
1 Biography
2 Writing career
3 Themes
4 Posthumous tributes
4.1 Centenary Born April 26, 1914
5 Awards Brooklyn, New York, United States
6 Bibliography Died March 18, 1986 (aged 71)
6.1 Novels
Manhattan, New York, United States
6.2 Story collections
6.3 Short stories Occupation Author, teacher
6.4 Books about Malamud Nationality American
7 References
Period 19401985
8 Sources
9 External links Genre Novel, short story

Biography
Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Bertha (ne Fidelman) and Max Malamud,
Russian Jewish immigrants. A brother, Eugene, born in 1917, lived a hard and lonely life and died in his fifties.
Malamud entered adolescence at the start of the Great Depression. From 1928 to 1932, Bernard attended
Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn.[3] During his youth, he saw many films and enjoyed relating their plots
to his school friends. He was especially fond of Charlie Chaplin's comedies. Malamud worked for a year at
$4.50 a day as a teacher-in-training, before attending college on a government loan. He received his B.A.
degree from City College of New York in 1936. In 1942, he obtained a master's degree from Columbia
University, writing a thesis on Thomas Hardy. He was excused from military service in World War II because
he was the sole support of his widower father. He first worked for the Bureau of the Census in Washington
D.C., then taught English in New York, mostly high school night classes for adults.

Starting in 1949, Malamud taught four sections of freshman composition each semester at Oregon State
University (OSU), an experience fictionalized in his 1961 novel A New Life. Because he lacked the Ph.D., he
was not allowed to teach literature courses, and for a number of years his rank was that of instructor. In those
days, OSU, a land grant university, placed little emphasis on the teaching of humanities or the writing of
fiction. While at OSU, he devoted three days out of every week to his writing, and gradually emerged as a
major American author. In 1961, he left OSU to teach creative writing at Bennington College, a position he
held until retirement. In 1967, he was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 1942, Malamud met Ann De Chiara (November 1, 1917 March 20, 2007), an Italian-American Roman
Catholic, and a 1939 Cornell University graduate. They married on November 6, 1945, despite the opposition
of their respective parents. Ann typed his manuscripts and reviewed his writing. Ann and Bernard had two
children, Paul (b. 1947) and Janna (b. 1952). Janna Malamud Smith is the author of a memoir about her father,
titled My Father Is A Book.

Raised Jewish, Malamud was in adulthood an agnostic humanist.[4]

Malamud died in Manhattan in 1986, at the age of 71.[5] He is buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. [6]

In his writing, Malamud depicts an honest picture of the despair and difficulties of the immigrants to America,
and their hope of reaching their dreams despite their poverty.

Writing career
Malamud wrote slowly and carefully; he was not especially prolific. He is the author of eight novels[7] and four
collections of short stories. The posthumously published Complete Stories contains 55 short stories and is 629
pages long. Maxim Lieber served as his literary agent in 1942 and 1945.

He completed his first novel, The Light Sleeper, in 1948, but later burned the manuscript. His first published
novel was The Natural (1952), which has become one of his best remembered and most symbolic works. The
story traces the life of Roy Hobbs, an unknown middle-aged baseball player who achieves legendary status
with his stellar talent. This novel was made into a 1984 movie starring Robert Redford (described by the film
writer David Thomson as "poor baseball and worse Malamud").

Malamuds second novel, The Assistant (1957), set in New York and drawing on Malamud's own childhood, is
an account of the life of Morris Bober, a Jewish immigrant who owns a grocery store in Brooklyn. Although he
is struggling financially, Bober takes in a drifter of dubious character. This novel was quickly followed by The
Magic Barrel his first published collection of short stories (1958). It won Malamud the first of two National
Book Awards that he received in his lifetime.[8]

In 1967, his novel The Fixer, about anti-semitism in Tsarist Russia, won both the National Book Award for
Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[1][2] His other novels include Dubin's Lives, a powerful evocation of
middle age which uses biography to recreate the narrative richness of its protagonists' lives, and The Tenants,
perhaps a meta-narrative on Malamud's own writing and creative struggles, which, set in New York City, deals
with racial issues and the emergence of black/African American literature in the American 1970s landscape.

Malamud was renowned for his short stories, often oblique allegories set in a dreamlike urban ghetto of
immigrant Jews. Of Malamud, Flannery O'Connor wrote: "I have discovered a short-story writer who is better
than any of them, including myself." He published his first stories in 1943, "Benefit Performance" in Threshold
and "The Place Is Different Now" in American Preface. In the early 1950s, his stories began appearing in
Harper's Bazaar, Partisan Review, and Commentary.

Themes
Writing in the second half of the twentieth century, Malamud was well aware of the social problems of his day:
rootlessness, infidelity, abuse, divorce, and more. But he also depicted love as redemptive and sacrifice as
uplifting. In his writings, success often depends on cooperation between antagonists. For example, in "The
Mourners" landlord and tenant learn from each other's anguish. In "The Magic Barrel", the matchmaker worries
about his "fallen" daughter, while the daughter and the rabbinic student are drawn together by their need for
love and salvation.[9]

Posthumous tributes
Philip Roth: "A man of stern morality," Malamud was driven by "the
need to consider long and seriously every last demand of an overtaxed,
overtaxing conscience torturously exacerbated by the pathos of human
need unabated."[10]

Saul Bellow, also quoting Anthony Burgess: "Well, we were here, first-
generation Americans, our language was English and a language is a
spiritual mansion from which no one can evict us. Malamud in his
novels and stories discovered a sort of communicative genius in the
impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York. He was a myth
maker, a fabulist, a writer of exquisite parables. The English novelist Grave of Bernard Malamud atMount
Anthony Burgess said of him that he 'never forgets that he is an Auburn Cemetery
American Jew, and he is at his best when posing the situation of a Jew
in urban American society.' 'A remarkably consistent writer,' he goes
on, 'who has never produced a mediocre novel .... He is devoid of either conventional piety or sentimentality ...
always profoundly convincing.' Let me add on my own behalf that the accent of hard-won and individual
emotional truth is always heard in Malamud's words. He is a rich original of the first rank." [Saul Bellow's
eulogy to Malamud, 1986]

Centenary

There were numerous tributes and celebrations marking the centenary

of Malamud's birth (April 26, 1914).[12][13] To commemorate the
centenary, Malamud's current publisher (who still keeps most of
Malamud's work in print) published on-line (through their blog) some
of the "Introductions" to these works.[14] Oregon State University
announced that they would be celebrating the 100th birthday "of one of
its most-recognized faculty members" (Malamud taught there from
1949 to 1961).[15]

Media outlets also joined in the celebration. Throughout March, April,

A signed copy of Malamud's bookThe
and May 2014 there were many Malamud stories and articles on blogs,
Natural held by Oregon State
in newspapers (both print and on-line), and on the radio. Many of these University.[11]
outlets featured reviews of Malamud's novels and stories, editions of
which have recently been issued by the Library of America.[16] There
were also many tributes and appreciations from fellow writers and surviving family members. Some of the
more prominent of these kinds of tributes included those from Malamud's daughter, from Malamud's
biographer Philip Davis,[17] and from fellow novelist and short story writer Cynthia Ozick.[18] Other prominent
writers who gathered for readings and tributes included Tobias Wolff, Edward P. Jones, and Lorrie Moore.[19]

Awards
National Book Award

(1959) Fiction, The Magic Barrel[8]

(1967) Fiction, The Fixer[1]

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

(1967) The Fixer[2]

O. Henry Award

(1969) "Man in the Drawer"

PEN/Malamud Award

Given annually since 1988 to honor Malamud's memory, the PEN/Malamud Award recognizes excellence in
the art of the short story. The award is funded in part by Malamud's $10,000 bequest to the PEN American
Center. The fund continues to grow thanks to the generosity of many members of PEN and other friends, and
with the proceeds from annual readings. Past winners of the award include John Updike (1988), Saul Bellow
(1989), Eudora Welty (1992), Joyce Carol Oates (1996), Alice Munro (1997), Sherman Alexie (2001), Ursula
K. Le Guin (2002), and Tobias Wolff (2006).

Bibliography
For a more comprehensive listing of works, see Bernard Malamud bibliography

Novels
The Natural (1952)
The Assistant (1957)
A New Life (1961)
The Fixer (1966)
Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (1969)
The Tenants (1971)
Dubin's Lives (1979)
God's Grace (1982)

Story collections

The Magic Barrel (1958)

Idiots First (1963)
Rembrandt's Hat (1974)
The Stories of Bernard Malamud (1983)
The People and Uncollected Stories (includes the unfinished novel The People) (1989)
The Complete Stories (1997)

Short stories

"The Mourners" (1955)

"The Jewbird" (1963)
"The Prison" (1950)
"A Summer's Reading"
"Armistice"

Books about Malamud

Smith, Janna Malamud. My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud. (2006)

Davis, Philip. Bernard Malamud: A Writers Life. (2007)
Swirski, Peter. "You'll Never Make a Monkey Out of Me or Altruism, Proverbial Wisdom, and Bernard
Malamud's God's Grace". American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and
Political History. New York, Routledge 2011.

References
1. "National Book Awards 1967" (http://www.nationalbook.org/nba1967.html). National Book
Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-30.
(With essay by Harold Augenbraum from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
 2. "Fiction" (http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/Fiction). Past winners & finalists by category. The Pulitzer
Prizes. Retrieved 2012-03-30.
3. Boyer, David. "NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: FLATBUSH; Grads Hail Erasmus as It Enters a Fourth
Century (https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F04EED8143AF932A25750C0A9679C8B6
3)", The New York Times, March 11, 2001. Retrieved 2007-12-01.
4. Markose Abraham (2011). American Immigration Aesthetics: Bernard Malamud and Bharati Mukherjee
As Immigrants. AuthorHouse. p. 146. ISBN 978-1-4567-8243-6. "An agnostic humanist, Malamud has
unflinching faith in man's ability to choose and make 'his own world' from the 'usable past'."
5. Rothstein, Mervyn (March 19, 1986). "Bernard Malamud Dies at 71" (https://www.nytimes.com/1986/0
3/19/books/malamud-obit.html) (obituary). The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-07-30.
6. "Bernard Malamud's page on Find A Grave" (https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid
=1406). Retrieved July 2, 2017.
7. Malamud, Bernard. The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989
8. "National Book Awards 1959" (http://www.nationalbook.org/nba1959.html). National Book
Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-30.
(With essays by Liz Rosenberg and Harold Augenbraum from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
9. "Bernard Malamud (19141986)" (http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/heath/syllabuild/iguide/ma
lamud.html). Contributing Editor: Evelyn Avery(?). Georgetown University course materials(?).
10. Roth, Philip, "Pictures of Malamud (https://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/20/books/malamud-roth.html?pa
gewanted=1)", The New York Times, April 20, 1986. Retrieved 2008-07-15.
11. "Inscribed, first-edition copy of acclaimed novel, "The Natural," donated to OSU" (http://oregonstate.ed
u/ua/ncs/archives/2009/sep/inscribed-first-edition-copy-acclaimed-novel-%E2%80%9C-natural%E2%8
0%9D-donated-osu). Oregon State University. Retrieved 5 May 2016.
12. "Bernard Malamud at 100" (http://www.92y.org/Event/Bernard-Malamud-at-100.aspx). 92Y.
13. "Bernard Malamud Tribute, Thursday May 1, 2014 (video)" (https://web.archive.org/web/201404261252
57/http://www.centerforfiction.org/calendar/bernard-malamud-tribute). Center for Fiction. Archived
from the original (http://centerforfiction.org/calendar/bernard-malamud-tribute) on April 26, 2014.
14. "Bernard Malamud Centenary - Work in Progress" (http://www.fsgworkinprogress.com/category/bernard
-malamud-centenary/). Work in Progress.
15. "OSU to celebrate 100th birthday of former faculty member Bernard Malamud - News & Research
Communications - Oregon State University" (http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2014/apr/osu-celebra
te-100th-birthday-former-faculty-member-bernard-malamud).
16. James Campbell (21 March 2014). "Book Review: Library of America's Bernard Malamud volumes" (htt
ps://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303730804579435001129600812). WSJ.
17. "Fuse Interview: Jewish-American Writer Bernard Malamud at 100 Appreciating the Beauty of the
Ethical" (http://artsfuse.org/102166/fuse-interview-jewish-american-writer-bernard-malamud-at-100-appr
eciating-the-beauty-of-the-ethical/).
18. Ozick, Cynthia (March 13, 2014). "Judging the World: Library of Americas Bernard Malamud
Collections" (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/books/review/library-of-americas-bernard-malamud-
collections.html?_r=1). The New York Times.
19. http://www.penfaulkner.org/2015/02/09/episode-40-the-legacy-of-bernard-malamud/

Sources
Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2004.
Contemporary Literary Criticism
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 28: Twentieth Century American-Jewish Fiction Writers. A
Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Daniel Walden, Pennsylvania State University. The Gale Group.
1984. pp. 166175.
Smith, Janna Malamud. My Father Is a Book. Houghton-Mifflin Company. New York: New York. 2006
Mark Athitakis, "The Otherworldly Malamud", Humanities, March/April 2014 | Volume 35, Number 2

External links
Daniel Stern (Spring 1975). "Bernard Malamud, The Art of Fiction No. 52". The Paris Review.
The Bernard Malamud Papers at Oregon State University
 Bernard Malamud on IMDb
Clark, Suzanne. "Bernard Malamud". The Oregon Encyclopedia.
Works by Bernard Malamud at Open Library

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