Within the narrower Jewish world, he wrote with special love about the idealistic shlimmazel, the obscure and the lonely and the suffering, as in the title story of Idiots First (1963) this is also the case with Morris Bober, the grocer protagonist of The Assistant. With magnificent virtuosity and integrity, he (like Saul *Bellow) used a dialect of American English mixed with Yiddish, and succeeded in transferring to the American scene the intense moral concern, the comic yet pathetic irony, and the traditional situations of East European Jewish culture. Malamud found his true voice, however, with his second novel, The Assistant (1957), and a collection of short stories, The Magic Barrel (1958). His first novel, The Natural (1952), about the rise and fall of a baseball hero, was a brilliant tour de force, displaying a characteristic mixture of realistic detail, vernacular language, and free-ranging symbolism and fantasy. One of the most significant of the younger generation of mid-20 th century American writers, Malamud was profoundly influenced by realistic novelists such as Dostoievski. Malamud was elected president of the American PEN Club for 1980. Born in New York City, Malamud began to teach in 1939, went west to Oregon State College (an experience used in his third novel, A New Life, 1961), and later taught at Harvard.
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