The Natural

Written by Bernard Malamud

A gifted ballplayer gets a late second chance at glory, and temptation follows.

3.6 Goodreads · 12,840 ratings

231 pages· 72,358 words· 1060L· AR 6.3 · 12 AR pts

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Bookroo's summary

Roy Hobbs, a baseball natural whose career was derailed in his youth, reappears years later as an aging rookie with a homemade bat and a talent that could carry a struggling team to the pennant. Bernard Malamud's first novel turns the old daylight era of baseball into a story of ambition, temptation and failure.

From the publisher

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."

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