Bernard Malamud (1914–1986), short story writer and novelist, was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants who owned a grocery store. Educated at the City College of New York and Columbia University, where he earned his B.A. and Master's degree, he taught high school and then college English until shortly before his death. Affected by World War II, he began investigating his Jewish identity and started reading about Jewish tradition and history. His works commonly employ literary conventions drawn from earlier Jewish literature. His first novel, The Natural (1952), a fable about a baseball player who is gifted with miraculous powers, deals with the nature of heroic figures. The Assistant (1957), which describes the relationship between a young Gentile hoodlum and an old Jewish grocer, affirms the redemptive value of maintaining faith in the goodness of the human soul. The Fixer (1966), which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, tells the story of a Jewish handyman unjustly imprisoned for the murder of a Christian boy in Czarist Russia. Other novels include A New Life (1961) and God's Grace (1982).

Malamud's renown as the best-known spokesman of the Jewish experience in America rests on his short stories, which transcend their ethnic origin to tell universal tales of men and women searching for love and coping with moral responsibility. He said the most important task of the writer is "to recapture his image as human being as each of us in his secret heart knows it to be." Using emotional, metaphorical language, Malamud presents magical events that often interlace the grim reality of his characters' lives. His most celebrated collection of short stories, The Magic Barrel (1958), received the National Book Award and earned him a Ford Fellowship. Other short story collections include Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (1969) and The Stories of Bernard Malamud (1983). The People and Uncollected Stories was published posthumously in 1989.