Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life

On his first day of teaching composition at Oregon State College in 1949, Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) told his class, “It has been brought to my attention that many of you people here today are practicing celibacy. I have nothing against this practice and will not penalize you for it.” This note of almost delightful silliness (or weird social inappropriateness) stands out in this important, thorough and at times compelling biography—the first ever of the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer. That scene stands out against the ordinariness of Malamud's life, which was essentially dedicated to work, though he had a more-or-less happy marriage (not without infidelities) and two children. This is at times more a literary analysis than a strict biography, as Davis, a professor of English literature at Liverpool University, strives to connect Malamud's life to his work: how the writer's preoccupation with his father's Brooklyn grocery, for example, is reflected in The Assistant . There is some fascinating background: wanting to write a novel about social injustice, Malamud considered the Sacco and Vanzetti and Caryl Chessman cases before settling on the blood libel case of Mendel Beilis, in The Fixer . Davis places Malamud in the context of American and Jewish-American literature, but this is written in a style that will appeal more to scholars than the general public. 32 b&w illus. (Oct.)