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Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life.

Article Excerpt
Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life. Philip Davis. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 377 pages. $34.95 hardcover.

Alfred Kazin: A Biography. Richard M. Cook. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 451 pages. $35.00 hardcover.

In Dubin's Lives (1979), Bernard Malamud's novel about a biographer, William Dubin believes that "There is no life that can be captured wholly as it was. Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction" (Davis 294). Nevertheless, we read the lives of writers we admire because we hope to better understand the human being behind the art. This pair of first biographies by first-time biographers succeeds in offering that kind of understanding and provides a version of their subjects' lives that all future biographers will inevitably draw upon. Both were written with the cooperation of their subjects' families and friends, and both draw extensively on unpublished collections of journals, notes, and letters to reveal the private lives behind the public records.

The public records have much in common. Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) and Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) were born a year and a few miles apart in Brooklyn, grew up...