Malamud, Bernard (1914–86),born in Brooklyn of immigrant Russian parents, after graduation from the City College of New York and holding various odd jobs worked for an M.A. at Columbia while teaching night classes in a high school. His first novel,
The Natural (1952), is a comic treatment of baseball in terms of a mythic view of the American hero. His second novel,
The Assistant (1957), is more realistic in its depiction of a pathetically unfortunate family of New York Jews and the assistant in their failing grocery store, but its treatment of the main character's search for the good life and his attempt to change himself is as much concerned with moral issues. His next novel,
A New Life (1961), is both witty and satirical in its treatment of the life of a Jewish professor of English literature at an Oregon “cow college,” but it too presents the theme of a man changing his life. Later novels include
The Fixer (1967, National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize), the story, based on a Russian case in 1913, of a Jew falsely accused of murder and the resultant attempt to break his spirit and that of all Jews in the country;
Pictures of Fidelman (1969), about a middle‐aged Bronx resident who goes to Italy to be an artist;
The Tenants (1971), treating conflicts between a white and black writer, the sole residents of a Lower East Side tenement;
Dubin's Lives (1979), about a famous author's marriage and love affair; and
God's Grace (1982), a pseudo‐Biblical fable about a man who is the sole human survivor of a nuclear war and begins a new civilization among apes. Malamud's stories, also often wryly treating unhappy experiences of Jews, are collected in
The Magic Barrel (1958, National Book Award),
Idiots First (1963), and
Rembrandt's Hat (1973); 25 of them are reprinted in a selected
Stories (1983).
The People (1989) posthumously published an unfinished novel and uncollected but lesser stories. He taught English at Oregon State University (1949–61)and at Bennington College from 1961 until his death.
