Culture January 1, 1

Irving Howe once called Bernard Malamud “the most enigmatic, even mysterious of American Jewish writers.” In his empathic, exhaustively researched Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, Philip Davis seeks to shed new light on Malamud’s career. The first scholar to be granted access to the Malamud archives (which include notebooks, journals, memoirs, drafts of novels and stories, and correspondence housed at the Library of Congress and the University of Texas, Austin), Davis offers an intimate portrait of Malamud’s various “lives,” from Brooklyn-born immigrant’s son to Jewish-American literary celebrity. By drawing on the archive, Bernard Malamud hovers near the primal sources of