Introduction
Canadian writer W. P. Kinsella's first novel, Shoeless Joe, published in Boston in 1982, is an ingenious baseball story that smoothly weaves together fact and fantasy. The narrator, Ray Kinsella, is a baseball fanatic and dreamer who owns a farm in Iowa. One day he hears a mysterious voice saying, "If you build it, he will come." Ray believes this is an instruction to build a baseball field at his farm and that the "he" is his father's hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson, one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Jackson was banned from baseball for life following the Black Sox Scandal of 1919, in which he and seven other players accepted bribes to throw the World Series. From this premise, Kinsella spins his tale full of magic and nostalgia. Shoeless Joe shows up, and Ray continues to pursue his dream, even traveling cross−country to kidnap the reclusive writer J. D. Salinger, who joins Ray in his quest to restore the broken dreams of the past.
Set in idyllic rural Iowa and told in lyrical, poetic, sometimes sentimental prose, Shoeless Joe is a story of the power of the imagination and the triumph of love. It is about dreams and hope and trust and the fulfillment of long−buried desires. The dominant note throughout is the characters' consuming love of baseball, which is presented almost as a religion, and is contrasted, favorably, with the spiritual dryness of conventional Christianity.
Shoeless Joe was made into the popular movie Field of Dreams in 1989, and for a while the words "If you build it, he will come" became almost as well−known in American popular culture as the famous phrase "Say it ain't so, Joe," allegedly spoken by a young fan to Shoeless Joe during the Black Sox Scandal.
Author Biography
William Patrick Kinsella was born on May 25, 1935, on a farm in Edmonton, in northern Alberta, Canada, the son of John Matthew and Olive Mary (Elliott) Kinsella. Kinsella did not attend school until fifth grade, but he caught up quickly and graduated from high school in 1953. After graduation, he worked at a variety of jobs in Edmonton. He was a government clerk, an insurance investigator, and then owner of a restaurant. He did not attend college until he was in his late thirties, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, in 1974. He then received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1978 and taught English for five years at the University of Calgary, Alberta, from 1978 to 1983.
Kinsella always thought of himself as a writer and published his first story when he was seventeen. His first story collection was Dance Me Outside (1977), about the Native North Americans of the Ermineskin Reservation in Alberta, Canada. Born Indian (1981) and Mocassin Telegraph (1983) were similar collections. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe (1982) was his first popular success, and it was made into the movie Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner, in 1989.
Since 1983, Kinsella has been a full−time writer and has carved a niche for himself as a writer of baseball fiction. In addition to Shoeless Joe, he has written several more novels, including The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1986), Box Socials (1991), and The Winter Helen Dropped By (1995). Story collections focusing on baseball include Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa (1980), the title story that formed the basis of the novel Shoeless Joe, and The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt (1988), which was reissued as Go the Distance (1995). Kinsella's most recent publications are Magic Time (1998), a novel about a college all−star who revives his baseball career by moving to Iowa, and Japanese Baseball (2000), a new collection of baseball stories.
Kinsella was awarded a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1982; he has
received a fiction award from the Canadian Authors Association (1982), a Vancouver writing award (1987), and the Stephen Leacock medal (1987). He was decorated with the Order of Canada in 1994, and in 1987 he was named Author of the Year by the Canadian Library Association.
Kinsella married Mildred Irene Clay in 1965, and they had three children before divorcing in 1978. In 1978, Kinsella married Ann Ilene Knight. They were divorced in 1997. Kinsella married for the third time, in 1999, to Barbara L. Turner.
Author Biography 3
