The Natural (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

The classical novel (and basis for the acclaimed film) now in a new editionIntroduction by Kevin BakerThe Natural , Bernard Malamud's first novel, published in 1952, is also the firstÑand some would say still the bestÑnovel ever written about baseball. In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, took on very different materialÑthe story of a superbly gifted "natural" at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball eraÑand 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 "Malamud has done something whichÑnow that he has done it!Ñlooks 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."