The Natural -- Bernard Malamud, Paperback

The classical novel (and basis for the acclaimed film starring Robert Redford) 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.

Author: Bernard Malamud
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 07/07/2003
Pages: 231
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.49lbs
Size: 8.28h x 5.48w x 0.62d
ISBN: 9780374502003

Accelerated Reader:
Reading Level: 6.3
Point Value: 12
Interest Level: Upper Grade
Quiz #/Name: 55938 / Natural

About the Author

Bernard Malamud (1914-86) wrote eight novels; he won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for The Fixer, and the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel. Born in Brooklyn, he taught for many years at Bennington College in Vermont.