On the twentieth anniversary of Bernard Malamud"s death, Janna Malamud Smith explores her father"s private, unpublished letters and journals to remember the life of a seminal writer of our time. Malamud left New York and his immigrant father"s failing grocery store, and his mother"s madness, for a humble position at an Oregon agricultural college. Smith remembers his demanding, ambitious writing schedule and his marriage"s fragile balance, but also his charm, humor, and devotion. She evokes the heady culture of his return east to Bennington and Harvard in the sixties and reveals her father"s intimacies--and her own--from that radically changing time.