Vintage classics
2 total works
The People is the last, great work of Bernard Malamud, one of the most celebrated American writers of the twentieth century, who was working on this novel when he died in 1986. Set in the Wild West in the nineteenth century, The People traces the unhappy fortunes of a tribe of native Americans who are cruelly evicted from their homeland by a greedy Washington government. In their search for a new place to settle, the tribe adopts a happy-go-lucky Jewish pedlar as their new chief. In his bizarre and responsible new role, Chief Jozip undergoes the same humiliations, sufferings and battles as his adopted tribe when he tries to lead them across the Rocky Mountains to Canada and a brighter future.
Bernard Malamud, renowned as a novelist, was also highly acclaimed as a writer of short stories. He himself wrote: 'Short stories, perhaps better than other forms of fiction, point up the haste and heaviness of the odds against us, and our million daily miraculous escapes from the worst of fates and the best of insights.' The magic in Malamud's stories is once again evident in Idiots First, both in the strange fantasy of a story like 'The Jewbird' or the title story 'Idiots First' and in the deeply moving realism of 'The German Refugee'. It is in the wit and comic gusto of 'Still Life' and in the strangeness of 'Naked Nude'.