The classical novel (and basis for the acclaimed film starring Robert Redford) now in a new edition
Introduction by Kevin Baker
The Natural, Bernard Malamud's first novel, published in 1952, is also the firstтАФand some would say still the bestтАФnovel ever written about baseball.
In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, took on very different materialтАФthe story of a superbly gifted "natural" at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball eraтАФand invested it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work. Four decades later, Alfred Kazin's comment still holds true: "Malamud has done something whichтАФnow that he has done it!тАФlooks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology."