Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn in 1914. He graduated from City College of New York in 1936 and earned an M.A. at Columbia University. He taught at Oregon State University and Bennington College.
He is known for the baseball novel The Natural (1952), The Assistant (1957) and The Fixer (1966). The Fixer won the National Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1967. He was one of the best-known American Jewish authors of the twentieth century and died in Manhattan in 1986.