The Tenants

First Edition, First Printing. Malamud's 6th novel. Fine in a fine, pictorial dust jacket. Publisher's original orange cloth with gold lettering and black-grey top stain. A wonderful copy of this Malamud classic. 

The Tenants is a story of a rivalry between two writers, one of them Jewish and the other, African-American, who are the last two people remaining in a soon to be condemned apartment building. Before Malamud wrote this novel, he'd already published two stories concerning the relationships between Jews and African-Americans: Angel Levine (1955) and Black Is My Favorite Color (1963). Further, 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 book, Malamud himself described The Tenants as a "tight, tense book, closer to the quality of short fiction."