Edward Lewis Wallant was an American writer. During his life he published the novels The Human Season (1960) and The Pawnbroker (1961). Wallant - a devoted family man with much potential - died of an aneurysm at the age of 36. Wallant began to write professionally aged thirty. He had served in the second world war, and had attended art school in New York. He had spent some time as an advertising art director in the city. Wallant has an elegant and fluid writing style - his books are written in rich, free-flowing prose. Wallant has been compared to other Jewish American writers such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.