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".

Ruth Ann Steinhagen was an American woman who shot and nearly killed Eddie Waitkus, star first baseman of the Philadelphia Phillies, on June 14, 1949, in one of the first instances of what later became known as stalker crimes. The incident is one of the inspirations for the 1952 baseball book The Natural, made into a 1984 film.