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 being 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 his self-made bat "Wonderboy".
Based loosely on the shooting incident and subsequent comeback of Philadelphia Phillies player Eddie Waitkus, the story of Roy Hobbs takes some poetic license and embellishes what was a memorable account of a career lost too soon. Apart from both Waitkus and Hobbs being shot by women in a Chicago hotel room (obsessed women they didn't know), there are few other similarities. It has been alternately suggested by historian Thomas Wolf that the shooting incident might have been inspired by Chicago Cubs shortstop Billy Jurges, who was shot by a showgirl with whom he was romantically linked, but Wolf offered no evidence to support this claim.
A film adaptation, The Natural, starring Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs, was released in 1984. In contrast to the film's ending, the novel features a much more bleak ending.
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