"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-century-long career, which was distinguished by his winning the Pulitzer Prize, for The Fixer, and two National Book Awards, for The Fixer and The Magic Barrel. The final novel of his lifetime, God's Grace, shows some optimism even after civilization has self-destructed. When the last man left on earth after a nuclear holocaust cries out to God about injustice and gets pelted with lemons, an intelligent chimp makes lemonade. Like this imaginative transformation of hardship into a God-send, Malamud rose from his Depression-era young adulthood to become a major American writer.

Malamud was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His parents, Russian-Jewish immigrants, worked sixteen hours a day in their small grocery store. Reflecting back on his youth...