The son of poor Jewish immigrants, Malamud was a self-made man who became one of the great triumvirate of Jewish American novelists – Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth. Bellow himself wryly dubbed them the Hart, Shaffner and Marx of literature, the literary equivalent of the first-generation rag trade moving upmarket to become a fine gentleman’s store. Philip Roth, the youngest of the three, was always comically annoyed to know that whenever he finally settled down to a morning’s writing, Malamud had already been hard at it for two hours. Unpublished as a novelist until he was aged thirty-eight, Malamud was the great reviser, content to write or re-write a page or two a day, slowly and belatedly making as much as he …
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Citation: Davis, Philip. "Bernard Malamud". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 26 September 2007 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2892, accessed 23 November 2024.]
