Bernard Malamud

Bernard Malamud was a Jewish American author born in Brooklyn, New York. Malamud’s parents fled tsarist Russia and immigrated to the United States before Malamud was born, but their experiences shaped his childhood and upbringing. Their family was poor and relied on a small grocery store his father owned as their primary income. When Malamud was 15, his mother died while in a mental institution, and Malamud took on responsibility for his older brother, Eugene, who struggled with the same mental illness as their mother. Though Malamud’s father was barely literate in English, Malamud valued education and sought out opportunities to learn. He graduated from City College of New York and continued his education at Columbia University. In 1945, Malamud married Ann De Chiara, an Italian American Catholic woman, and together they had two children. He taught at various high schools in New York City, after which he taught at Oregon State University and Bennington College in Vermont. While living and teaching in Oregon, he prioritized making time to write, and during this time he published his first novel, The Natural, which would later become an emblem of his literary style. In addition to novels, Malamud also published several short story collections, one of which, The Magic Barrel, earned a National Book Award. Malamud received a second National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his fourth novel, The Fixer, in 1967. Much of his work, including The Fixer, explores the Jewish American immigrant experience and addresses antisemitism after the Holocaust. Before he died in 1986, Malamud published a total of eight novels and four collections of short stories.