Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1991) was a Polish- born Jewish-American author of short stories, novels, essays, cultural criticism, memoirs, and stories for children. His career spanned nearly seven decades of literary production, writing in Yiddish and translating himself into English with collaborators and editors. Singer published widely during his lifetime, including nearly sixty stories in The New Yorker, and received numerous awards and prizes, including two Newberry Honor Book Awards (1968 & 1969), two National Book Awards (1970 & 1974) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1978). Known for fiction that portrayed 19th- century Polish Jewry, modern Jewish life before and after the Second World War, as well as supernatural tales that combined Jewish mysticism with demonology, Singer was a master storyteller whose sights were set squarely on the tension between human nature and the human spirit.