Bernard Malamud: The Grocer's Son of Brooklyn

Bernard Malamud Photo Credit: 2011 Nancy R. Schiff

A note from our founder

Our twelfth tribute goes to a writer who turned the struggle behind his family's grocery counter into some of the most compassionate fiction of the postwar era. Bernard Malamud spent years teaching night classes just to keep writing — and eventually became one of the defining voices of Jewish-American literature.

A Grocer's Son in the Depression

Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 26, 1914, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents who ran a small, struggling grocery store. His early life was shaped by the economic hardship of the Great Depression, an experience that would surface again and again in his fiction. He graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, earned his bachelor's degree from City College of New York, and completed a master's at Columbia University.

Teaching Nights, Writing Later

Long before literary success arrived, Malamud spent over a decade teaching evening high school classes across Brooklyn just to make ends meet, writing his earliest short stories late at night after the workday was done. That grinding schedule shaped a fiction defined by a rare blend of stark urban realism and elements of myth, fable, and magical realism. Above all, his work carried a deep empathy for the ordinary person: "The world is full of people who are suffering," he once said, "and my job is to write about them with compassion."

National Recognition

Malamud's career eventually reached the highest levels of American letters. He won the National Book Award for Fiction twice — first in 1959 for The Magic Barrel, and again in 1967 for The Fixer, the same year that novel also earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He went on to teach for many years at Bennington College in Vermont and at Oregon State University. He died in Manhattan on March 18, 1986, at the age of 71.

Bibliography

Novels

• The Natural (1952) — His famous debut novel, a brilliant blend of Arthurian legend and American sports culture, tracking Roy Hobbs, a baseball prodigy with a magical bat whose career is derailed by a tragic shooting.

  
  

• The Assistant (1957) — Set entirely in a bleak, suffocating Brooklyn grocery store, this psychological masterpiece follows a young Italian-American drifter who robs a struggling Jewish grocer, only to return out of intense guilt to assist the family and adopt their burdens.

  
  

• A New Life (1961) — A satirical, academic novel drawing on his time in the Pacific Northwest, following a reformed alcoholic from New York who takes a teaching job in Oregon, searching for a fresh start.

  
  

• The Fixer (1966) — His Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel based on the real-life 1913 trial of Menahem Mendel Beilis in Tsarist Russia, exploring the severe antisemitism faced by a Jewish handyman wrongfully accused of a ritual murder.

  
  

• The Tenants (1971) — A tense, claustrophobic look at race and art, centering on a Jewish novelist and an aspiring Black writer who are the final two residents remaining in an abandoned, decaying Manhattan tenement building.

  
  

• Dubin's Lives (1979) — A deeply introspective character study following a middle-aged biographer undergoing an intense midlife crisis and an obsessive extramarital affair with a much younger woman.

  
  

• God's Grace (1982) — His final completed novel, a striking apocalyptic fable following the lone human survivor of a nuclear holocaust who attempts to build a new, moral civilization on an island populated by talking chimpanzees.

  
  

Short Story Collections

• The Magic Barrel (1958) — His National Book Award-winning debut collection, compiling thirteen beautifully moving tales of poor, lonely New York immigrants, matchmakers, and shoemakers struggling for connection.

  
  

• Idiots First (1963) — A powerful collection focusing on themes of dignity and the harsh finality of life, featuring the haunting title story about a dying father desperately trying to secure train fare for his disabled son.

  
  

• Rembrandt's Hat (1973) — An elegant collection exploring the fragile nature of human friendships, artistic jealousy, and hidden resentments.

READ MALAMUD

Start with The Assistant if you want to step directly into the Brooklyn grocery store that shaped him, or The Magic Barrel if you'd rather begin with the collection that first announced his talent to the world. Either way, you'll find the same quiet compassion that Malamud carried with him from behind his family's counter. Get the book.

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