The Natural

The classical novel (and basis for the acclaimed film) now in a new edition

Introduction by Kevin Baker

The Natural, Bernard Malamud’s first novel, published in 1952, is also the first—and some would say still the best—novel ever written about baseball. In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, took on very different material—the story of a superbly gifted “natural” at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era—and 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 which—now that he has done it!—looks 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.”

The author's first novel, a story about the baseball hero Roy Hobbs. "He possesses a gift for characterization that is often breathtaking." -- The New York Times

Biting, witty, provocative, and sardonic, Bernard Malamud's The Natural is widely considered to be the premier basebal novel of all time. It tells the story of Roy Hobbs—an athlete born with rare and wondrous gifts—who is robbed of his prime playing years by a youthful indiscretion that nearly consts him his life. But at an age when most players are considering retirement, Roy reenters the game, lifting the lowly New York Knights from last place into pennant contention and becoming an instant hero in the process. Now all he has to worry about is the fixers, the boss, the slump, the jinx, the fans...and the dangerously seductive Memo Paris, the one woman Roy can't seem to get out of his mind.

Harry Sylvester

Back in the thirties the baseball writers making the swing through the West with the major league teams occasionally wondered whether one of their number would ever produce a serious novel about baseball. That novel has finally been written-- and if the author does not come from the ranks of baseball reporters, at least he hails from Brooklyn and there are those who feel that qualifies him ex officio. It's an unusually fine novel, too although I don't know how the professionals are going to take it. For Bernard Malamud's interests go far beyond baseball. What he has done is to contrive a sustained and elaborate allegory in which the "natural" player--who operates with ease and the greatest skill, without having been taught-- is equated with the natural man who, left alone by, say, politicians and advertising agencie, might achieve his real fulfillment...

Concerned with many of the moral and spiritual questions at the heart of the Jewish-American experience, Bernard Malamud brought to his fiction the need to ask serious questions in the guise of compelling, page-turning stories. In stories set in America, Europe and Russia, Malamud s characters speak in a rich, provocative language that captures the ear and shows a master eavesdropper at work.