18 Facts About Bernard Malamud

1.

Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer.

2.

Bernard Malamud was born in 1914 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Bertha and Max Malamud, Russian Jewish immigrants.

3.

From 1928 to 1932, Bernard Malamud attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn.

4.

Bernard Malamud worked for a year at $4.50 a day as a teacher-in-training, before attending college on a government loan.

5.

Bernard Malamud received his BA degree from City College of New York in 1936.

6.

Bernard Malamud was excused from military service in World War II because he was the sole support of his widower father.

7.

Bernard Malamud first worked for the Bureau of the Census in Washington DC, then taught English in New York, mostly high school night classes for adults.

8.

In 1942, Bernard Malamud met Ann De Chiara, an Italian-American Roman Catholic, and a 1939 Cornell University graduate.

9.

Bernard Malamud died in Manhattan on March 18,1986, at the age of 71.

10.

Bernard Malamud is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

11.

Bernard Malamud wrote slowly and carefully; he is the author of eight novels and four collections of short stories.

12.

Bernard Malamud completed his first novel, The Light Sleeper, in 1948, but later burned the manuscript.

13.

Bernard Malamud's first published novel was The Natural, which has become one of his best remembered and most symbolic works.

14.

Bernard Malamud's second novel, The Assistant, set in New York and drawing on Bernard Malamud's own childhood, is an account of the life of Morris Bober, a Jewish immigrant who owns a grocery store in Brooklyn.

15.

Bernard Malamud was renowned for his short stories, often oblique allegories set in a dreamlike urban ghetto of immigrant Jews.

16.

Bernard Malamud was a myth maker, a fabulist, a writer of exquisite parables.

17.

Bernard Malamud is devoid of either conventional piety or sentimentality.

18.

Bernard Malamud is a rich original of the first rank.