Write Your Heart Out

It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer who said, "Write your heart out": Bernard Malamud (books by this author), born in Brooklyn (1914). He grew up poor during the Depression. His parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants who ran a grocery store that was open for 16 hours a day, and the family lived above it. There were no books in the house until Malamud was nine and almost died of pneumonia. He was confined to his bed, and his father bought him a 20-volume set of The Book of Knowledge, a children's encyclopedia.

After earning a master's from Columbia, he spent a few years teaching high school English, then applied for 200 jobs as a college professor. He was offered two. So he headed out to Corvallis, Oregon, to teach at Oregon State, a land grant university that wouldn't let him teach any classes on literature, only Freshman Composition' four sections of the same class, every semester. He taught there for 12 years and published some of his best-known novels, including The Natural (1952), The Assistant (1957), and The Magic Barrel (1958). After Malamud won the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel, he was finally allowed to teach literature classes. Three years later, he was offered a position at Bennington College in Vermont, where he taught for the rest of his career. WRITER'S ALMANAC