Bernard Malamud was born on April 26, 1914, in
Brooklyn, New York, the son of Bertha (née Fidelman) and Max Malamud,
Russian Jewish immigrants who owned and operated a succession of grocery stores in the
Williamsburg,
Borough Park and
Flatbush sections of the borough, culminating in the 1924 opening of a German-style
delicatessen (specializing in "cheap canned goods, bread, vegetables, some cheese and cooked meats") at 1111
McDonald Avenue on the western fringe of Flatbush. (Then known as
Gravesend Avenue, the thoroughfare received its current moniker in 1934, while the surrounding community—abutting the elevated
BMT Culver Line and characterized as a "very poor" subsection of the neighborhood in a contemporaneous demographic survey of
Brooklyn College students—is now considered to be part of the
Kensington section.) A brother, Eugene, born in 1917, suffered from mental illness, lived a hard and lonely life and died in his fifties. Bertha Malamud was "emotionally unstable" and attempted suicide by swallowing disinfectant in 1927; although her elder son discovered her in time, she died in a mental hospital two years later. Malamud entered adolescence at the start of the
Great Depression, graduating from central Flatbush's storied
Erasmus Hall High School in 1932. During his youth, he saw many films and enjoyed relating their plots to his school friends. He was especially fond of
Charlie Chaplin's comedies. He received his
BA degree from the
City College of New York in 1936. Thereafter, Malamud worked for a year at $4.50 a day () as a student teacher; however, he twice failed an examination that would enable him to become a permanent
substitute teacher in the New York City public school system. Momentarily funded by a government loan, he completed the coursework for a
master's degree in English at
Columbia University in 1937-38; although he felt it was "close to a waste of time", he eventually received the degree after submitting a thesis on
Thomas Hardy in 1942. From 1939-40, he was a temporary substitute teacher at
Lafayette High School in the
Bath Beach section of Brooklyn. He was excused from
World War II-era military service because he was the sole support of his father, who had remarried to Liza Merov in 1932. While working in a temporary capacity for the
Bureau of the Census in
Washington D.C., he contributed sketches to
The Washington Post, marking some of his first published works. Returning to New York after the job ended, he taught English at Erasmus Hall (in its adult-oriented evening session) for nine years while focusing on writing during the day. Toward the end of this period, he also worked at the similarly oriented
Chelsea Vocational High School (where he taught in the day program to supplement his income) and
Harlem Evening High School. Starting in 1949, Malamud taught four sections of freshman composition each semester at
Oregon State University, an experience fictionalized in his 1961 novel
A New Life. Because he lacked a
PhD, he was not allowed to teach literature courses, and for a number of years, his rank was that of instructor; nevertheless, he was promoted to
assistant professor in 1954 and became a tenured
associate professor in 1958. While at OSU, Malamud devoted three days out of every week to his writing, and gradually emerged as a major American author. In 1961, he left OSU to teach creative writing at
Bennington College, a position he held until retirement. He was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967. In 1942, Malamud met Ann De Chiara (November 1, 1917 – March 20, 2007), an Italian American
Roman Catholic, and a 1939
Cornell University graduate. Despite the opposition of their parents (prompting their relocation from Brooklyn to
Greenwich Village), they married on November 6, 1945. Ann typed his manuscripts and reviewed his writing. They had two children, Paul (b. 1947) and
Janna (b. 1952). Janna is the author of a memoir about her father, titled
My Father Is A Book. Malamud was Jewish, an
agnostic, and a
humanist. He died in
Manhattan (where he had maintained a winter residence at the
Upper West Side's
Lincoln Towers since 1972) on March 18, 1986, at the age of 71. He is buried in
Mount Auburn Cemetery in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. In his writing, Malamud depicts an honest picture of the despair and difficulties of the immigrants to America, and their hope of reaching their dreams despite their poverty. ==Writing career==