Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 167
By This is the grave of Bernard Malamud.
Born in 1914 in Brooklyn, Malamud graduated from City College in 1936 and received a master’s degree from Columbia in 1942. Beginning in 1949, he taught 4 courses a semester of freshman writing at Oregon State University, a task that I do not envy especially to a bunch of engineering and forestry students at OSU, if their professional writing is any sign. In 1961, he left OSU for Bennington College. Through all of this, he managed to become a prolific writer, which given the amount of grading he had to do, is quite impressive, even not considering the quality of his books. He wrote 8 novels and 4 collections of short stories in his career. He began with The Natural in 1952, which of course became a beloved movie two decades later. The only Malamud I’ve actually read is his 1957 novel The Assistant, which I thought was pretty excellent. He won the National Book Award and Pulitzer for The Fixer in 1967. Malamud died in 1986.
Bernard Malamud is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.