SOURCE: Malamud, Bernard, and Leslie Field and Joyce Field. “An Interview with Bernard Malamud.” In Conversations with Bernard Malamud, edited by Lawrence M. Lasher, pp. 35-46. Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1991.

In the following interview, conducted through an exchange of letters in 1973 and originally published in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays in 1975, Malamud discusses specific aspects of his writing, divorced from any biographical influence.

The following commentary and summary from an exchange of letters between Mr. Malamud and the interviewers from May 11, 1973 to August 2, 1973 reveal the nature and scope of this interview.

We wrote Mr. Malamud asking him to agree to an interview because even though his fiction is the important thing, we felt that a full-scale interview could contribute a great deal also. His response to a variety of questions would, we believed, be most helpful to readers, students, critics, and scholars.

Ours...