The Pawnbroker A Novel

“In the short time [Wallant] was writing - about three years wherein he considered himself and was considered a serious writer - he was counted as part of a brilliant group of postwar Jewish American writers - Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth among them. That Wallant died so young, unable to travel on with these writers, is criminal, especially given how prolific he was. But the novels he finished in his short life are all miniature masterpieces." — Dave Eggers

“[R]eminiscent of Dostoevski....on every count [ The Pawnbroker ] deserves the attention of every serious reader." — Thomas Lask, The New York Times

“Wallant has...written an honest and moving book about human experience at its most dismal." — R. D. Spector, New York Herald Tribune

“Edward Lewis Wallant is a gifted writer who probes with a kind of troubled tenderness into pools of human darkness." — David Boroff, Saturday Review

“Sol Nazerman, the erudite Shylock of Harlem, is a creature of fasicnating complexity....he is that literary rarity—the character whose sorrows seem as real as the reader's own." — TIME magazine

“Well written and painfully memorable." — George Adelman, Library Journal

"[T]he book gains energy from its plot, which involves a mobster and a planned robbery that puts Sol in an awful position that Wallant thoughtfully interrogates throughout: how do you trustfully navigate the world when you've experienced the worst that people are capable of?" — Kirkus Reviews

“No contemporary novelist was more gifted in the sheer grace of constructing a novel...." — Charles Alva Hoyt

“an American naturalist in the tradition of Dreiser and Norris...." — Robert W. Lewis

We don't need to imagine how shocking The Pawnbroker must have been to readers in the early 1960s because it is still that shocking to us. Without a trace of sentimentality, Edward Lewis Wallant wrote the Great American Novel of Redemption. Before anyone else, he showed us that only by recognizing in others the face of human suffering could the individual survivor—whether male or female, Jewish, black, or Puerto Rican—transcend his or her inheritance of trauma and pain." — Eileen Pollack, author of In the Mouth and Breaking and Entering

"Post-Holocaust novel par excellence. Timeless and well ahead of its time. Lose yourself in Wallant's lyrically imbued world of traumatic memories and its collision with contemporary life." — Thane Rosenbaum, author of The Golems of Gotham , Second Hand Smoke , and Elijah Visible