Bernard Malamud, 1914 - 1986

Novelist Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York (1914). His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and they struggled to survive on the income from a tiny grocery store. He fell in love with movies when he was a kid, especially Charlie Chaplin movies, and found that he enjoyed retelling the plots of those movies to his classmates. He wanted to write, but he graduated from college in the middle of the Depression, and he was struggling just to earn enough money to eat and pay the rent. In 1940, he got a job as a clerk in the U.S. Census Bureau. He spent mornings checking drainage ditch statistics, but as soon as that work was done he would crouch over his desk and write short stories on company time.
Having discovered what he wanted to write about, Malamud decided to find a job that would give him more time for writing. So he applied for a position teaching freshman composition at Oregon State College. And it was there, thousands of miles away from his hometown in Brooklyn, that Malamud began to write stories mixing Jewish mysticism with his memories of people from his old neighborhood. They would eventually become the stories in his first collection, The Magic Barrel (1958). (less)