Author Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York on April 26, 1914. The son of recently emigrated Russian Jews, he spent his early years in New York City, attending the City College of New York and acquiring his M.A. from Columbia University in 1942. In 1949 Bernard Malamud moved to Corvallis, Oregon to teach English Composition at Oregon State College (now Oregon State University) and remained there until 1961. He was the author of 13 books, including The Natural, his first book published in 1952.

He also published a collection of short stories entititled The Magic Barrel while teaching at OAC. Other of his published works include Long Work, Short Life, The Cost of Living, The Assistant, and two more short story collections. He left OSC in 1961 for Harvard and concluded his teaching career at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. Malamud is considered one of the century's most significant American novelists and writers of short stories. His novel The Fixer won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as one of the two National Book Awards he received during his lifetime. He died of a heart attack in Vermont in 1986.