Malamud's The Assistant

About The Assistant

Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) was an American novelist and short story writer who is, with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, one of the three defining figures of mid-century Jewish-American fiction. Born in Brooklyn to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, he was educated at CCNY and Columbia and taught at Oregon State University for twelve years before moving to Bennington College, where he spent the rest of his academic career. The Natural (1952) was his debut novel, a mythological baseball story; The Assistant (1957) is his masterwork — a morally serious account of a failing Jewish grocer and the Italian-American drifter who becomes his assistant. The Fixer (1966) won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The Magic Barrel (1958), his first story collection, won the National Book Award; his stories, particularly 'The Magic Barrel,' 'Idiots First,' and 'The Jewbird,' are among the finest in the language. He is the most morally serious and the most contained of the mid-century Jewish-American novelists, less intellectually pyrotechnic than Bellow and less sexually explicit than Roth, but arguably the most emotionally concentrated.