Eulogizing him in 1986, Saul Bellow pronounced that Bernard Malamud ‘in his novels and stories discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York.
He was a myth maker a fabulist, a writer of exquisite parables.’
With this volume and its companion, Novels and Stories of the 1960s. The Library of America initiates a three-volume edition celebrating, in Bellow’s words, ‘a rich original of the first rank.’
At age thirty-eight, after a long apprenticeship writing stories, Bernard malamud published his first book, The Natural (1952), and instantly redefined the possibilities of sports fiction.
Reimagining the colorful characters and storied episodes of baseball lore, Malamud imbued the tale of Roy Hobbs - a once-promising prospect whose first chance at a big-league career had been sabotaged by a deranged female fan - with the grandeur of myth.
Armed with Wonderboy, his beloved bat, Roy leads his New York Knights in an unlikely run at the league pennant.
The quest leads him ever deeper into a thicket of intrigue involving the team’s venal owner, the manager’s irresistible niece, and Roy’s own insatiable appetites.
The son of a cash-strapped Brooklyn grocer, Malamud transformed the bleak world of his youth into fiction in his next novel, The Assistant (1957).
Aging shopkeeper Morris Bober has sunk his entire life into a modest grocery that has long been on the verge of failure.
An armed robbery at the store seems another crushing blow, yet it brings about a change more momentous than he could have expected when one of the perpetrators, a drifter from the West named Frank Alpine, is shaken with remorse and comes to work for Morris.
Within the confines of the claustrophobic storefront and the surrounding neighborhood, Malamud creates a riveting drama about suffering, endurance, and the possibility of redemption.
Critically acclaimed upon publication, The Assistant won Malamud the first of two National Book Awards.
