“A story to me means a plot where there must be some surprise, because
that is how life is, after all, full of surprises.” – Isaac Bashevis Singer
Singer, born outside of Warsaw, Poland on this date in 1902, started out wanting to be a journalist but kept getting drawn toward the creative side instead.
He was first groomed to be a rabbi, but that too proved a fruitless endeavor and he gravitated quickly into the writing life. After emigrating to the U.S. where he lived, worked and wrote for newspapers and journals in New York City, he debuted as a fiction writer in 1925 with the short story "In Old Age." In 1935, his first novel, Satan in Goray, was published.
Singer wrote short stories that reflected his daily life and times, among them the acclaimed "Gimple the Fool." But it was his novel, The Family Moskat, about a family living in the ghettos of pre–World War II Poland, that brought him worldwide recognition.
One of his most recognized works from his later years was Enemies: A Love Story, about the emotional struggle of a Holocaust survivor. In 1978, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his life’s body of work.
Commenting at the time, Singer said, “A good writer, I’ve discovered, is basically a storyteller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.”
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