Shoeless Joe

Overview

Ray Kinsella, sitting on the porch of his Iowa farm one evening, hears the voice of a ghostly baseball announcer. It speaks to him the famous line, "If you build It, he will come." Needing no further explanation, Kinsella visualizes the ball field he is being asked to create in the middle of his field of corn. The voice will speak only two more things to Ray: "Ease his pain" and "Go the distance," and yet the dreaming, idealistic man knows just what it is he has to do. Digging up his corn to build a ballpark will inspire the return of baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson, a man whose reputation was forever tarnished by the scandalous 1919 World Series. Thus begins Shoeless Joe, the award-winning novel by W.P. Kinsella which also inspired Kevin Costner's exceedingly popular film, Field of Dreams.

W.P. Kinsella has been called a great writer of baseball novels, but this is misleading. While his works all evince a love for the game he grew up watching, Kinsella doesn't merely treat baseball as a subject in itself. Rather, he uses it as a metaphor, a way to talk about things like innocence, belief and, perhaps above all, America. Shoeless Joe is a parable about one of the most fundamental of American ideals, beginning anew. Ray Kinsella, by plowing up a large section of his farmland, is both building and rebuilding, creating what had never been there and re-creating what had come before. The land was once a place where the sins of the old could be expunged and a new vision realized, and this kind of renewal is what Kinsella's quixotic creation brings about.

W.P. Kinsella's novel is perhaps most importantly a story of personal renewal through redress of the sins and trauma of the past. The announcer says, "Ease his pain," which Ray intuitively understands to mean the pain of the great reclusive American writer, J.D. Salinger. Salinger, abraded by the publicity garnered by the worldwide success of his novel, The Catcher in the Rye, has withdrawn into almost total solitude, refusing to publish any more of his writings. Salinger is, along with Shoeless Joe, an American icon whose notoriety has spoiled something that was once was pure and passionate. Baseball, and what it represents, will help ease his pain.

The field will also allow Shoeless Joe, a legend whose name, the book suggests, was unfairly besmirched by the infamous "Black Sox" scandal, to return to the game he loves But more importantly, the ghost of Shoeless Joe is a link between Ray Kinsella and his father, a man from whom he has been estranged for many years. And thus the book is finally a story about Kinsella's own renewal, and the opportunity the field provides for him to face his ghosts.

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Author Information

Bio of W.P. Kinsella

Canadian author W.P. Kinsella is somewhat of a late bloomer. Born in 1935 on a farm in Northern Alberta, Kinsella didn't receive his B.A. in creative writing until the age of 39. Before that he held a series of odd jobs, including working as a taxi driver, selling insurance, and managing a restaurant. He began writing short fiction at the age of 17 but didn't see public success until the publication of 1979's Dance Me Outside. He became a sensation with 1982's Shoeless Joe, a novel about an Iowa man who digs up his cornfield in order to build a baseball park. The novel, an elaboration of his short story, "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa," won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and was made into the incredibly popular film Field of Dreams (1989). Kinsella greatly admired the film, although his other experiences with Hollywood have been less than positive. Many of Kinsella's works focus on baseball, the game he loves and grew up watching. Other works of his include The Thrill of the Grass (1985), The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1996), and Magic Time (2001). His other great subject is Native Americans, the focus of his novels The Moccasin Telegraph (1985) and The Fencepost Chronicles (1987). W.P. Kinsella has taught creative writing at the University of Calgary for many years and lives in Canada.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Rosetta Books

Filesize

1018.29 KB

Number of Pages

272

eBook ISBN

0795330855