MALAMUD, Bernard. The Natural.

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952.

8vo.; in burgundy cloth, with dust-jacket; jacket severely damaged, torn, with many large sections missing.

First edition, first printing. Inscribed by Malamud on free front endpapers: “For Eugene Wize [?] and Pa / With love, Bernie”. Eugene was Malamud’s younger brother, who suffered from mental illness and died in his fifties.

Malamud’s debut, considered by readers and critics as one of the best baseball novels, and the basis for the 1984 film directed by Barry Levinson and starring Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs. 

Alfred Kazin wrote of Malamud’s The Natural: “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.”