Malamud\'s first novel, published in 1952, is also the first--and some would say still the best--novel ever written about baseball.
He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology..
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.
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.
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 takes on the story of a superbly gifted Natural at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era--and invests it with the hardscrabble poetry, grand and believable, that runs through all his best work.
Malamud\'s first novel, published in 1952, is also the first--and some would say still the best--novel ever written about baseball
