After he'd completed the novel, Malamud himself described The Tenants as a "tight, tense book, closer to the quality of short fiction.

"[7] Malamud's biographer explains the genesis of the novel this way: Malamud's imagination had been set going initially by a series of newspaper reports in January 1969 on New York slum landlords, seeking to get lingering tenants out of apartment properties which the landlords wished to sell off or tear down and convert into new office buildings.

[8]A quick synopsis of the book's story was provided in the book jacket: The sole tenant in a run-down tenement, Harry Lesser is struggling to finish a novel, but his solitary pursuit of the sublime grows complicated when Willie Spearmint, a black writer ambivalent toward Jews, moves into the building.

[9]As the story unfolds, all the building's residents have moved out with the exception of Lesser, who believes he's the sole remaining occupant and plans on staying until he completes his third novel.

Then he hears the sound of a typewriter and soon discovers that it belongs to Willie Spearmint (who eventually adopts Bill Spear as a pen name) who has taken over one of the abandoned apartments as his writing space.