Bernard Malamud

Bernard Malamud (April 26, 1914 – March 18, 1986) was an American writer.

Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York to a Jewish family. He is most renowned for his short stories, oblique allegories often set in a dreamlike urban ghetto of immigrant Jews. His prose, like his settings, is an artful pastiche of Yiddish-English locutions, punctuated by sudden lyricism. On Malamud's death, Philip Roth wrote: "A man of stern morality, [Malamud was driven by] a need to consider long and seriously every last demand of an overtaxed, overtaxing conscience torturously exacerbated by the pathos of human need unabated." (Malamud's friend and editor Robert Giroux later disputed that Malamud's morality was ever "stern".)

The Fixer, his best-known novel, won the National Book Award in 1966 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Malamud's novel The Natural was made into a movie starring Robert Redford (described by the film writer David Thomson as "poor baseball and worse Malamud"). Among his other novels were The Assistant, set in a Jewish grocery store in New York and drawing on Malamud's own childhood, Dubin's Lives, a powerful evocation of middle age which uses biography to re-create the narrative richness of its protagonists' lives, and The Tenants an arguably meta-narrative on Malamud's own writing and creative struggles, which, set in New York deals with racial issues and the emergence of black/African American literature in the American '70s landscape.

His daughter, Janna Malamud Smith, relates her memories of her father in her memoir, My Father is a Book.

Quotes

"I write a book or a short story three times. Once to understand her, the second time to improve her prose, and a third to compel her to say what it still must say."

"It was all those biographies in me yelling, "We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you."

"Once you've got some words looking back at you, you can take two or three-or throw them away and look for others."

"Where there's no fight for it there's no freedom. What is it Spinoza says? If the state acts in ways that are abhorrent to human nature it's the lesser evil to destroy it."

"All men are Jews, though few men know it."

"Life responds to one's moves with comic counterinventions."

"Without heroes we would all be plain people and wouldn't know how far we can go."

Bibliography

• The Natural (1952)
• The Assistant (1957)
• The Magic Barrel (1958)
• A New Life (1961)
• Idiots First (1963)
• The Jewbird (short story)(1963)
• The German Refugee (1964)
• The Fixer (1966)
• Pictures of Fidelman (1969)
• The Tenants (1971)
• The secret life of our times (1973) as a contributor to this work by Gordon Lish
• Rembrandt's Hat (1974)
• Dubin's Lives (1979)
• God's Grace (1982)
• The Stories of Bernard Malamud (1983)
• The People and Uncollected Stories (1989)
• The Complete Stories (1997)
• The Mourners

External links

• The Paris Review interview
• 1986 Real Audio interview with Robert Giroux, friend and co-worker of Bernard Malamud by Don Swaim
• The Bernard Malamud Papers at Oregon State University

"The Jewbird" -April 11, 1963