Bernard Malamud

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Bernard Malamud (April 26, 1914 – March 18, 1986) was an American writer born in Brooklyn, New York to a Jewish family. He was born in April 1914 in New York. Malamud 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'.)

His best-known novel, The Fixer, won the National Book Award in 1966, and also 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 grocers in New York and drawing on Malamud's own childhood, and Dubin's Lives, a powerful evocation of middle age which uses biography to re-create the narrative richness of its protaganists' lives.

A memoir of the author was recently published by his daughter, Janna Malamud Smith. The British scholar Philip Davis is currently writing an authorized biography.

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