About the Book

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."

Product Details

Media: Paperback Book, 231 pages

Language: English

Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux (Jul. 31st, 2003)

ISBN-10: 0374502005

ISBN-13: 9780374502003

Dimensions: 5.48 x 8.28 x 0.62 inches

Shipping Weight: 0.49 lbs

• Categories: Literary Fiction and Literature