The Tenants.
MALAMUD, Bernard.
The Tenants.
First Edition of Bernard Malamud's The Tenants; Warmly Inscribed by Him to Close Friends Suzanne and Paul Shrag
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.
$450.00
In Stock
Item Number: 100067
First edition of Malamud’s sixth novel. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For Susie and Paul With affection for dear friends- Bern.” The recipients, Suzanne and Paul Shrag were close friends of Malamud and brother of printmaker Karl Schrag. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Muriel Nasser. Housed in a custom clamshell box.
Malamud began the initial composition of the novel in 1969 and completed it in 1971. Its plot concerns a rivalry between two writers—one of them a Jew and the other an African-American— who are the last two persons remaining in a soon to be condemned apartment building. Before Malamud began writing this novel, he'd already "published two short stories treating relationships between blacks and Jews": "Angel Levine" (1955) and "Black Is My Favorite Color" (1963). And in at least one other story, "The Mourners" (1955), he had examined the fraught relationship between a tenant and a landlord. After he'd completed the novel, Malamud himself described The Tenants as a "tight, tense book, closer to the quality of short fiction."
