Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life

Here is the first full-length biography of Bernard Malamud, the self-made son of poor Jewish immigrants who went on to become one of the foremost novelists and short-story writers of the post-war period, a man who at the peak of his success stood alongside Saul Bellow and Philip Roth in the ranks of Jewish American writers.

To tell Malamud's story, Philip Davis has drawn on exclusive interviews with family, friends, and colleagues; unfettered access to private journals and letters; and detailed analysis of Malamud's working methods through previously unresearched manuscripts. Nothing came easily to Malamud: his family was poor, his mother probably committed suicide when Malamud was 14, and his younger brother inherited her schizophrenia. Davis's meticulous biography explores the many connections between Malamud's life and work, revealing all that it meant for this man to be a writer, both in terms of how he brought his life into his writing and how his writing affected his life. It also restores Bernard Malamud's literary reputation as one of the great original voices of his generation, a writer of superb subtlety and clarity.

The New York Times - Lee Siegel

…[a] wise, scrupulous, resolutely admiring biography…Davis is out to remove the slur of moral uptightness and narrow virtue from Malamud's reputation. Gratifyingly, he wants to restore him to the pantheon of great American writers in which Malamud, in our flash-in-the-pan culture, once belonged.

Philip Davis is Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University. He has been reading Malamud for over thirty years.