Since at least the 1950s, when Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth won National Book Awards for collections of short fiction, Jews have been at the forefront of the American short story tradition. And Jewish characters had been appearing prominently in short stories since the turn-of-the-century, when they cropped up often in popular magazine fiction. Meanwhile, Yiddish writers in America, like Abraham Reisen and L. Shapiro, had been concentrating on short stories for decades before that, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, while also well-known as a novelist, is famous as a master of the short story form.