"The First Seven Years" by Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud was born on April 26, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants Bertha (Fidelman) and Max Malamud. His father kept a small grocery store where he worked seven days a week to keep the business afloat.
Malamud always wanted to be a writer and began writing stories when he was eight or nine. In 1932 he enrolled at City College of New York, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1936. From 1936 to 1938 he attended Columbia University and was awarded a Masters degree in literature in 1942.
Malamud worked as a clerk in the Bureau of the Census in Washington, D.C. From 1940 to 1949, he taught evening classes in high schools, mostly to immigrants in Brooklyn. During this period, he continued to write in his spare time. His first published stories appeared in 1943.
Malamud married Anne de Chiara, who was of Italian descent, in 1945. They had a son, Paul, born in 1947 and a daughter, Janna, born in 1952.
In 1949 Malamud accepted a position at Oregon State College, in Corvallis, Oregon, where he taught English composition. He continued to write and in 1950 his stories appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Partisan Review, and Commentary. His first novel, The Natural, was published in 1952.
In 1956 Malamud lived in Rome and traveled in Europe. In the following year his novel, The Assistant, which drew on his observations of his father’s life as a struggling grocer, was published. The Magic Barrel, which included the story “The First Seven Years,” followed in 1958 and in that year, Malamud was awarded the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Daroff Memorial Award. In 1959, The Magic Barrel received the National Book Award, and from 1959 to 1961 Malamud was a Ford Fellow of the humanities and arts program.
Malamud left Oregon State College, where he had risen to the rank of associate professor, in 1961, and joined the faculty at Bennington College in Vermont. In the same year, his third novel, A New Life, was published, followed in 1963 by Idiots First, a collection of short stories. In 1966 Malamud published what is often considered his best novel The Fixer, which was awarded the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Malamud’s next book was Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (1969), followed by The Tenants (1971), and Rembrandt’s Hat (1973). In 1976 he was awarded the Jewish Heritage Award of the B’nai B’rith and in 1983, he received the Gold Medal for fiction from the Academic Institute.
Malamud’s final two works before his death in New York City on March 18, 1986, were Dubin’s Lives (1979) and God’s Grace (1982). The People and Uncollected Stories (1989) was published posthumously.