When he was ten, the family moved to Edmonton.Īs an adult, he held a variety of jobs in Edmonton, including as a clerk for the Government of Alberta and managing a credit bureau. 'I'm one of these people who woke up at age five knowing how to read and write,' he says.

Kinsella was raised until he was 10 years-old at a homestead near Darwell, Alberta, 60 km west of the city, home-schooled by his mother and taking correspondence courses. William Patrick Kinsella was born to John Matthew Kinsella and Olive Kinsella in Edmonton, Alberta. His work has often concerned baseball and Canada's First Nations and other Canadian issues. William Patrick Kinsella, OC, OBC was a Canadian novelist and short story writer. Shoeless Joe is #47 on the Sports Illustrated Greatest 100 Sports books. Most importantly, this is a story about renewal and redress of trauma and sins of the past. It is exactly this sort of renewal that Kinsella’s quixotic creation brings about. The land had been a place where past sins could be expunged and a new vision realized. Shoeless Joe is a parable about one of the most fundamental American ideals: beginning anew.īy plowing up a large section of his farmland, Ray Kinsella is both building and rebuilding, creating what has never been as well as re-creating in a sense what had come before. Kinsella doesn’t merely treat baseball as a subject in and of itself instead, he uses it as a metaphor to discuss larger issues such as innocence, belief, and perhaps above all of these things, America. Kinsella has been called a great writer of baseball novels but this title transcends that description. Kinsella which was the inspiration for the incredibly popular film Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner.

He knows that digging up the corn field in the back of his house will inspire the return of baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson, a man whose reputation was forever tarnished by the scandalous 1919 World Series. The voice will speak only two other things to Ray: 'Ease his pain' and 'Go the distance,' and yet the dreaming, idealistic man knows just what he is supposed to do. Ray Kinsella is sitting quietly on the back porch of his Iowa farm one evening when he hears the ghostly voice of a baseball announcer who says to him, 'If you build it, he will come.' Needing no further explanation, Kinsella immediately sees in his mind’s eye a baseball field that he is being asked to create in the middle of a corn field.

Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella