20 Facts About Bernard Malamud

Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer.

Bernard Malamud was born on April 26,1914, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Bertha and Max Malamud, Russian Jewish immigrants who owned and operated a succession of grocery stores in the Williamsburg, Borough Park and Flatbush sections of the borough, culminating in the 1924 opening of a German-style delicatessen at 1111 McDonald Avenue on the western fringe of Flatbush.

Bertha Malamud was "emotionally unstable" and attempted suicide by swallowing disinfectant in 1927; although her elder son discovered her in time, she died in a mental hospital two years later.

Bernard Malamud entered adolescence at the start of the Great Depression, graduating from central Flatbush's storied Erasmus Hall High School in 1932.

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

Thereafter, Bernard Malamud worked for a year at $4.50 a day as a student teacher; however, he twice failed an examination that would enable him to become a permanent substitute teacher in the New York City public school system.

Bernard Malamud was excused from World War II-era military service because he was the sole support of his father, who had remarried to Liza Merov in 1932.

Bernard Malamud was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Philip Roth: "A man of stern morality", Bernard Malamud was driven by "the need to consider long and seriously every last demand of an overtaxed, overtaxing conscience torturously exacerbated by the pathos of human need unabated".

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

Bernard Malamud is devoid of either conventional piety or sentimentality.

Bernard Malamud is a rich original of the first rank.