Even the team that Roy Hobbs nearly takes all the way from the cellar to the championship are called the Knights. In the game of baseball, however, even Bucky “Bleeping” Dent can singlehandedly send an entire city into a depression for months.īernard Malamud’s debut novel The Natural has divided critics since it first appeared over its attempt to meld men playing a game in a field with mythic overtones harking back to King Arthur and his knights. Team sports are defined by the fact it takes a team effort to win even if the team has the single best player in the game. What good is a quarterback without a line to protect him and receivers to catch the pass? A red-hot point guard can run up a 55 points by himself, but if his teammates don’t successfully stop their opponents from scoring less than 70, all those baskets will have been for nothing. Baseball presents the dynamic of the rugged individual against the power of the cooperative in a way unlike any other team sport. Yet at the same that a single individual with no help at all from any of his teammates can turn a looming loss into a celebratory win, the defense must depend upon every member of the team at play in the field coming through and working as a collective unit. When the batter steps into the plate, the power to earn a run out of that at-bat is upon his shoulders alone. Baseball is both a team sport and an individual sport-often simultaneously. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.īaseball is a unique sport with an essential duality that no other team or individual sport can claim. They had two children, Paul and Janna, the latter of which has penned a memoir about Bernard entitled My Father is a Book.These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. Malamud met his wife, Ann De Chiara in 1942, and the pair married a few years later. Additionally, both The Fixer and The Natural were adapted as popular films. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about the trial of a Jewish man in Tsarist Russia, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Malamud’s writing bears the influence of his upbringing during the Great Depression: his characters are often working class or poor, bound to lives of suffering and punishment.
Extolled as one of the preeminent mid-Twentieth AmericanJewish authors alongside Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, many of Malamud’s eight novels and fifty-five short stories speak to the American Jewish experience, as well as issues related to Jewish immigration and racial identity.
He then worked as a teacher and an English professor before achieving success as a writer. He earned a BA from City College of New York and went on to earn his master’s degree from Columbia University. Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants.
0 kommentar(er)
