The Natural

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."