Bernard Malamud

Malamud is most renowned for his short stories, oblique allegories often set in a dreamlike urban ghetto of immigrant Jews. His prose, like his settings, is an artful pastiche of Yiddish-English locutions, punctuated by sudden lyricism. On Malamud's death, Philip Roth wrote, "A man of stern morality," Malamud was driven by, "a need to consider long and seriously every last demand of an overtaxed, overtaxing conscience torturously exacerbated by the pathos of human need unabated." His best-known novel, The Fixer, won the National Book Award in 1966, and Malamud received a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.