Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) was an American novelist and short story writer celebrated for his richly moral fiction and his exploration of Jewish American life. Born in Brooklyn to Russian immigrant parents who ran a small grocery store, Malamud drew on that working-class, immigrant milieu throughout his career, even when his stories ventured into other settings and subjects.
He first gained wide acclaim with The Natural (1952), a mythic baseball novel later adapted into the popular 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His reputation was cemented with The Assistant (1957) and the story collection The Magic Barrel (1958), which won the National Book Award. In 1967, his novel The Fixer, based on the real-life case of a Jewish man falsely accused of ritual murder in czarist Russia, won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a second National Book Award.
Alongside Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Malamud is often regarded as one of the great voices of 20th-century Jewish American literature, known for blending realism with fable-like, allegorical touches and a deep concern with suffering, guilt, and redemption. He taught for many years at Bennington College in Vermont and continued writing until his death in 1986.
The Assistant
Bernard Malamud
A young Italian-American criminal seeks redemption by working for and ultimately sacrificing his own identity to help the struggling Jewish grocer he once robbed.
The Magic Barrel
Bernard Malamud
The Natural
Bernard Malamud
A gifted baseball player gets a second chance at stardom years after a tragic shooting ruined his early career, exploring the myths of American sports heroics.
The Fixer
Bernard Malamud
Set in Tsarist Russia, this National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows a Jewish handyman who is unjustly imprisoned for a ritual murder he did not commit.
The Complete Stories
Bernard Malamud
The Tenants
Bernard Malamud
A striking examination of racial tensions that unfolds inside an abandoned tenement building, where a Jewish novelist and an aspiring African-American writer battle over their creative work and personal pride.
A New Life
Bernard Malamud
A reformed alcoholic from New York moves to the Pacific Northwest to start fresh as a college professor but quickly gets entangled in academic politics and a scandalous affair.
Dubin's Lives
Bernard Malamud
A middle-aged biographer faces a profound midlife crisis as he struggles to write about D. H. Lawrence while embarking on a passionate, disruptive affair with a much younger woman.
God's Grace
Bernard Malamud
Malamud's final completed novel is an apocalyptic fable that tracks the lone human survivor of a nuclear holocaust as he attempts to build a new, moral society with a community of talking apes.