The saddest and most moving section in the Library of America Bernard Malamud '60s edition

No doubt the saddest and most moving section of the Library of America Bernard Malamud collection of stories and novels from the 1960s is the excellent, detailed chronology of Malamud's life at the end of the volume - the economic struggles of his father, a Jewish-Ukrainian immigrant running a little store in Brooklyn, his mother's mental illness, disappearance, suicide, the lifelong battle his brother also fought against mental illness, his estrangement from his father after he married outside the faith (they eventually reconciled), and the many rejections and failures he endured as he worked to establish himself as a writer - teaching evening classes, writing by day, publishing in tiny outlets if at all. When he finally won a teaching job it was at Oregon State, then a sort of tech school far, far off the academic and literary mainstream - it's amazing that his talent did not get buried there, but he persevered and succeeded against every imaginable odds. Reading the chronology, you can't help but note, however, how different the literary and academic world was back then, for better or worse: today, there are far fewer outlets for publication, particularly paid publication - fewer magazines, fewer publishers, fierce competition for agents (Malamud had one from the outset, unlikely today), fewer literary editors; in the academic world, the job he landed on Oregon State, considered almost an exile at the time, would be highly coveted today - an student with a master's degree and no publications to speak of would not be a serious candidate. But then, it was the best he could do. Unmentioned in the chronology - the more prestigious East Coast jobs almost never went to Jewish candidates - so many talented Jewish academics had to begin their careers in the far west or the Midwest; that situation - the Jewish academe in exile - is the subject of the first work in the collection, A New Life, a very funny if sorrowful novel about a Malamud stand - Sy Levin, beginning a teaching job a a college in the state of "Cascadia." (Unlike M., his prototype is a single man, fleeing something - we're not yet told what - back home in NYC.) For anyone who's read this novel and thinks the portrait of the pompous, bloviating, and idiotic department chair - so proud of the 13th edition of his student-hated Elements of Grammar, which he requires all students in the entire college to purchase - is over the top, I can assure you that it is not at all over the top; it's high comic but, sadly, realistic - I personally had a job interview with someone at a Mass business college who coujld have been this guy to a T.