Pulitzer Prize-winning author Bernard Malamud’s first novel is still one of the best ever written about baseball. His story of a superbly gifted “natural” at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era is invested with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work.

First published in 1952, this novel has since become an American classic. Five 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."

Bernard Malamud was born in 1914 in Brooklyn, the son of Russian immigrant Jews, and educated at Columbia University. He wrote eight novels, winning a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for The Fixer, but his genius is most apparent in short stories, such as the National Book Award-winner, The Magic Barrel. Malamud taught English at Oregon State University from 1949 to 1961, and died in 1986.