Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer born in Brooklyn on April 26, 1914, who worked in the English language across fiction of varying forms and lengths.
Malamud was educated at Erasmus Hall High School, then at the City College of New York, and later at Columbia University. Alongside his writing career, he worked as a university teacher and also as a screenwriter. His fiction output encompassed novels and short story collections. Among his novels are The Natural, The Assistant, A New Life, The Fixer, Pictures of Fidelman, Dubin's Lives, and God's Grace. His short story collection The Magic Barrel further demonstrated his work in shorter forms.
The recognition Malamud received during his lifetime was considerable. He was awarded the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the O. Henry Award. These accolades reflected the sustained attention his work attracted from literary institutions over the course of his career.
Malamud died in Manhattan on March 18, 1986. His body of work spans the baseball-centered narrative of The Natural, the novels The Assistant, A New Life, The Fixer, Dubin's Lives, and God's Grace, and the short story collection The Magic Barrel, together representing a writing career conducted consistently in the English language across several decades.
Quotes by Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud's insights on:
In a sick country every step to health is an insult to those who live on its sickness.
Being born a Jew meant being vulnerable to history, including its worst errors. Accident and history had involved Yakov Bok as he had never dreamed he could be involved. The involvement was, in a way of speaking, impersonal, but the effect, his misery and suffering, were not. The suffering was personal, painful, and possibly endless.
It’s one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it’s another not to be able to live by what one does know.
I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
She waited uneasily and shyly. From afar he saw that her eyes – clearly her father’s – were filled with desperate innocence. He pictured, in her, his own redemption. Violins and lit candles revolved in the sky. Leo ran forward with flowers out-thrust.
