The Natural

The Natural is a 1952 novel about baseball by Bernard Malamud, and is his debut novel. The story follows Roy Hobbs, a baseball prodigy whose career is sidetracked after he is shot by a woman whose motivation remains mysterious. The story mostly concerns his attempts to return to baseball later in life, when he plays for the fictional New York Knights with the bat he made, "Wonderboy." Some observers have taken the Hobbs character to have been modeled on the Philadelphia Phillies player Eddie Waitkus, called "the natural" in his early years in the sport, for Waitkus was shot, just as Hobbs is in the book, in a Chicago hotel room by an obsessed woman whom he didn't know. Others suggest Malamud may have found inspiration in the shooting of the Chicago Cubs shortstop Billy Jurges, likewise in a Chicago hotel room, by a showgirl with whom he was romantically linked. However, Malamud isn't known to have cited either story when discussing his influences for The Natural, instead telling of professional baseball players who were his childhood heroes in New York: "I wrote The Natural as a tale of a mythological hero… [I] tried to use [mythology] to symbolize and explicate an ethical dilemma of American life.” A film adaptation of the same name starring Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs was released in 1984. In contrast to the book, the film ends victoriously.