Malamud, Bernard

Novelist and short story writer Bernard Malamud was born in 1914 and raised in Brooklyn. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants, and his heritage would play a key role in his development as a writer. He was also influenced by growing up during the the Depression and by 19th-century writers such as Hawthorne and Melville. His bittersweet, tragicomic stories often merge reality and fantasy, and explore the human condition through themes of suffering and moral obligation. His work has won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. He also had a long career as an educator. He died in 1986.

American author.

Author. Born 1914, died 1986.

Author Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York on April 26, 1914. The son of recently emigrated Russian Jews, he spent his early years in New York City. He attended the City College of New York and acquired his M.A. in English from Columbia University in 1942. In 1949 Bernard Malamud moved to Corvallis, Oregon, to teach English composition at Oregon State College (now Oregon State University). He left OSC in 1961 for Harvard and concluded his teaching career at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. Malamud is considered one of the century's most significant American novelists and writers of short stories. His novel The Fixer won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as one of the two National Book Awards he received during his lifetime. He died of a heart attack in Vermont in 1986. He was the author of 13 books, including The natural, his first book published in 1952. He also published a collection of short stories entititled The magic barrel while teaching at Oregon State. His other works include Long work, short life, The cost of living, The assistant, A new life and two more short story collections.