Bernard Malamud Letter Network
Within this project you will find a small collection of letters to and from Bernard Malamud. It is our hope that one day this project will encompass all of Malamud's correspondence. For now, we are limited in scope to the collections at Oregon State, the Library of Congress, and the Harry Ransom Center. These collections primarily focus on correspondence between Malamud and other literary and/or famous individuals. Though Malamud wrote his brother Eugene more often than anyone else, none of their conversations appear in these collections because we were unable to obtain these letters from the UT-Austin Harry Ransom Center. For this reason and others like it, our project does not claim to present a comprehensive picture for all of Malamud's correspondence. As Miriam Posner suggests, we must recognize "simultaneously the value of any particular dataset and its inevitable poverty, compared with the phenomena it purports to describe."
We organize these letters using three different interfaces. The map pinpoints the locations for each letter's sender. Malamud's book A New Life identifies many regional differences between the east and west coasts, and we thought it best for our project to reflect similar themes. The network interface identifies the most common correspondents. Our hope is to emphasize the relationships, both professional and personal, that appear in our collection. The third interface contains images of the letters we have cataloged and partial transcriptions. As a whole, we hope our project provides multiple perspectives for reading and analyzing Malamud's correspondence, giving users a better picture and understanding of Malamud's life.
View a geographic map of Malamud's letter network.
View a directed graph of Malamud's correspondent relationships.
