Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century.

[2] Bernard Malamud was born on April 26, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Bertha (née Fidelman) and Max Malamud, Russian Jewish immigrants who owned and operated a succession of grocery stores in the Williamsburg, Borough Park and Flatbush sections of the borough, culminating in the 1924 opening of a German-style delicatessen (specializing in "cheap canned goods, bread, vegetables, some cheese and cooked meats")[3] at 1111 McDonald Avenue on the western fringe of Flatbush.

(Then known as Gravesend Avenue, the thoroughfare received its current moniker in 1934, while the surrounding community—abutting the elevated BMT Culver Line and characterized as a "very poor" subsection of the neighborhood in a contemporaneous demographic survey of Brooklyn College students[4]—is now considered to be part of the Kensington section.)

Bertha Malamud was "emotionally unstable" and attempted suicide by swallowing disinfectant in 1927; although her elder son discovered her in time, she died in a mental hospital two years later.

[6] Malamud entered adolescence at the start of the Great Depression, graduating from central Flatbush's storied Erasmus Hall High School in 1932.

Returning to New York after the job ended, he taught English at Erasmus Hall (in its adult-oriented evening session) for nine years while focusing on writing during the day.

[8] Starting in 1949, Malamud taught four sections of freshman composition each semester at Oregon State University, an experience fictionalized in his 1961 novel A New Life.

In 1942, Malamud met Ann De Chiara (November 1, 1917 – March 20, 2007), an Italian American Roman Catholic, and a 1939 Cornell University graduate.

In his writing, Malamud depicts an honest picture of the despair and difficulties of the immigrants to America, and their hope of reaching their dreams despite their poverty.

The story traces the life of Roy Hobbs, an unknown middle-aged baseball player who achieves legendary status with his stellar talent.

[1][2] His other novels include Dubin's Lives, a powerful evocation of middle age (largely inspired by Malamud's own extramarital affairs) that employs biography to recreate the narrative richness of its protagonists' lives, and The Tenants, perhaps a meta-narrative on Malamud's own writing and creative struggles, which, set in New York City, deals with racial issues and the emergence of black/African American literature in the American 1970s landscape.

Malamud was renowned for his short stories, often oblique allegories set in a dreamlike urban ghetto of immigrant Jews.

Shortly after joining the faculty of Oregon State University, his stories began appearing in Harper's Bazaar, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, and Commentary.

Writing in the second half of the twentieth century, Malamud was well aware of the social problems of his day: rootlessness, infidelity, abuse, divorce, and more.

Past winners of the award include John Updike (1988), Saul Bellow (1989), Eudora Welty (1992), Joyce Carol Oates (1996), Alice Munro (1997), Sherman Alexie (2001), Ursula K. Le Guin (2002), and Tobias Wolff (2006).