Bernard Malamud Summary

Biography EssayIn recent years, it has been impossible to discuss the career of Bernard Malamud without mentioning his place as the second partner, along with Bellow and Roth, in the ruling triumvirat... Read more

"The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself," Bernard Malamud remarked in 1958, quoting existential writer Albert Camus. He managed to uphold this purpose during his half... Read more

Bernard Malamud writes Jewish-American fiction. He has been a leader in this field for years and has received international acclaim for his novels and short stories. His first short story, "Benefit Pe... Read more

In the following interview, conducted through an exchange of letters in 1973 and originally published in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays in 1975, Malamud discusses specific aspects of... Read more

In the following essay, Malin suggests autobiographical elements in Pictures of Fidelman that allow Malamud to explore his role as an artist. Although many critics have written about Bernard Malamud a... Read more

In the following essay, Alter explores differences in Malamud's interpretation of historical significance in The Fixer, which Alter categorizes as a novel of “Jewish historicism,”... Read more

In the following essay, Briganti contends that women in Malamud's fiction generally exist only to provide the momentum or impetus for the male characters to reach self-knowledge. It is generall... Read more

In the following essay, Pifer discusses Malamud's use of artificial, highly stylized narrative devices in The Natural. In The Natural, a host of literary devices draws attention to the “... Read more

In the following essay, Mellard argues that A New Life is both an academic novel and a pastoral. Bernard Malamud's A New Life (1961) has been labeled many things—a Western and a “... Read more

In the following essay, Aarons explores elements of Jewish ethics of compassion in Malamud's short stories. “You bastard, don't you understand what it means human?” With th... Read more

In the following essay, Abramson discusses major themes and motifs in The Assistant, particularly asceticism and imprisonment, and the contrast between Judaic ethics and American materialism. The Natu... Read more

In the following essay, Brown explores Malamud's “radical dissent from contemporary despair” in “The First Seven Years.” “Negative capability” is the c... Read more

In the following essay, Lauricella considers The Natural as a composite of novel and romance with a “failed hero.” The romance, which deals with heroes, is intermediate between the novel... Read more

Critical Essay by Sheldon Norman Grebstein Malamud best represents the phenomenon of the Jewish Movement; not only is he one of its founders and major practitioners, he is probably its best single exe... Read more

Critical Essay by David R. Mesher In Bernard Malamud's writing,… Jewishness is more of a literary device than it is a religious, historical, or sociological representation. Malamud... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert Towers Bernard Malamud's risk-taking new novel ["Dubin's Lives"] moves into areas not usually associated with his art. In many of the famous short ... Read more

Critical Essay by Pearl K. Bell In such early work of Bernard Malamud as the tales collected in The Magic Barrel and the penitential drama of The Assistant, the painful, intractable truths of immigran... Read more

Critical Essay by Harriet Polt "As a writer, I want uncertainty. It's part of life. I want something the reader is uncertain about," Malamud said in a 1966 interview. This he has ... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert Alter [None of Bernard Malamud's] longer fictions has the absolute rightness of tone and invention of his best short stories [collected in The Stories of Bernard Malamu... Read more

Critical Essay by Paul Gray Sprinters do not ordinarily sign up for marathons, nor do lonely long-distance runners enter the crush of 100-yard dashes. But some authors perform an analogous feat by wri... Read more

Critical Essay by Alan Lelchuk How often is it that a major contemporary novelist opens his latest book with a dialogue between God and man? Or employs for his main characters one human being and a ch... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert Alter Bernard Malamud is a writer who early on established an emphatic paradigm for his fictional world and who ever since has been struggling in a variety of ways to escape i... Read more

Bernard Malamud was born on April 26, 1914 and raised in Brooklyn, New York.  He was the older of two sons of Jewish Russian immigrants.  His father worked for 16 hours a day as a grocer. &n... Read more