The Magic Barrel was published by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, New York, on 13 May 1958, in a first printing of approximately 5,000 copies priced at $3.75. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1959. The collection established Malamud alongside Bellow and Roth as one of the three great Jewish-American fiction writers of the postwar era, and several of its stories — particularly the title story, “The Last Mohican,” and “Angel Levine” — have entered the canon of American short fiction.
The Stories
The thirteen stories are set primarily in the Jewish neighbourhoods of New York — the grocery stores, shoe-repair shops, tenement apartments, and night schools that Malamud knew from his own childhood in Brooklyn. The characters are immigrants and the children of immigrants: small shopkeepers, rabbinical students, struggling artists, lonely men and women seeking connection in a city that offers none.
“The Magic Barrel” — the title story — follows Leo Finkle, a rabbinical student about to be ordained, who consults Pinye Salzman, a marriage broker (matchmaker). Salzman shows him photographs from his “magic barrel” of eligible women. Leo rejects them all. Then he discovers, in Salzman’s files, a photograph of a young woman whose face arrests him — she is Salzman’s own daughter, Stella, whom Salzman considers wild and beyond redemption. Leo seeks her out. The story ends with him running toward her through the city streets while Salzman, around the corner, chants prayers for the dead.
“The Last Mohican” follows Arthur Fidelman, a young art critic, to Rome, where he is pursued by Shimon Susskind, an impoverished Jewish refugee who demands Fidelman’s spare suit and ultimately steals his Giotto manuscript. “Angel Levine” describes a Jewish tailor visited by a Black angel who offers salvation if the tailor can believe in him. Each story operates on two levels: realistic surface and moral fable.
Collecting The Magic Barrel
First edition (1958, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy): Approximately 5,000 copies, $3.75.
Identification points:
- Farrar, Straus and Cudahy imprint
- First printing stated
- Dust jacket
Approximate market values:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $2,000–$6,000
- Signed first edition: $4,000–$10,000
- Without jacket: $150–$400
Value trajectory: Strong demand. The National Book Award and the collection’s canonical status keep prices firm. Short-story collections by major authors are a specialist market, and The Magic Barrel is one of the most important American story collections of the postwar period. Malamud’s death in 1986 limits signed supply.
Malamud’s Moral Imagination
The stories in The Magic Barrel share a moral universe in which suffering is not meaningless but transformative — not automatically, and not without cost, but genuinely. Malamud’s characters do not triumph over adversity in any Hollywood sense; they endure it, and their endurance gives them a dignity that the world cannot take away. This is a specifically Jewish vision — rooted in the long history of diaspora and persecution — but Malamud universalises it with a compassion that crosses every boundary.