Bernard Malamud
United States
Spare, unadorned sentences weighted with moral consequence: ordinary suffering rendered in a plain, almost liturgical cadence.
Malamud worked his way through City College of New York and Columbia while his immigrant parents' Brooklyn grocery struggled through the Depression, then taught night-school English to adults for nearly a decade in New York before a teaching post at Oregon State University, where, lacking a doctorate, he was barred for years from teaching literature at all, gave him time to write.
The Natural, his 1952 debut, reimagined baseball as Arthurian myth; The Assistant and the story collection The Magic Barrel built his reputation on immigrant Jewish characters facing moral tests rendered in a voice closer to parable than realism. The Fixer, based loosely on a real czarist Russia blood-libel case, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1967.
He later taught for decades at Bennington College in Vermont, writing steadily until his death in 1986.
Their books in the atlas
- 1957
The AssistantLvl 5psychological novel - 1958
The Magic BarrelLvl 5short story collection - 1966
The FixerLvl 6historical fiction
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