The Natural

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.