Stern

Name: Stern
ISBN: 9789362513137

Bruce Jay Friedman

Stern (1962), Bruce Jay Friedman's debut novel, is a landmark of American "black humor" fiction and a cornerstone of the Jewish-American literary tradition of the era. The novel follows its titular anti-hero, a nervous, self-doubting suburban everyman, after he moves his family to a new neighborhood and a neighbor makes a vaguely antisemitic remark to his wife. What follows is a darkly comic descent into paranoia, humiliation, and psychosomatic illness, as Stern obsesses over the incident, imagines confrontations he's too anxious to have, and unravels under the pressures of assimilation, masculinity, and suburban alienation.

Blending absurdist comedy with genuine unease, the novel established Friedman as a defining voice alongside contemporaries like Joseph Heller and Philip Roth, and its portrait of anxious, self-lacerating manhood proved deeply influential on the "black humor" movement of the 1960s.

About the Author

Bruce Jay Friedman (1930–2020) was an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, and one of the defining voices of the "black humor" literary movement of the 1960s. Born in the Bronx, New York City, he was noted for his versatility across literature and pop culture, and graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in journalism before serving as an Air Force officer during the Korean War. He went on to become executive editor of several men's adventure magazines for Magazine Management Co.

Friedman made his literary debut with the novel Stern (1962), and followed it with acclaimed works including A Mother's Kisses (1964), About Harry Towns (1974), and the essay collection The Lonely Guy's Book of Life (1978), later adapted into the Steve Martin film. He was an early figure in modern American black humor alongside peers Joseph Heller, Stanley Elkin, and Thomas Pynchon, a style named in part after Black Humor, a 1965 anthology he edited. His plays included the off-Broadway hits Scuba Duba and Steambath, and his screenwriting credits include the Oscar-nominated Splash (1984) and Stir Crazy (1980).

The New York Times praised his writing for making dark but giggle-inducing sport of the deep, if not pathological, insecurities of his white, male, middle-class and often Jewish protagonists. Friedman died in 2020 at age 90.