“Most
people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I
discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take
the situation and invent stories to go with it.”
– W. P. Kinsella
William
Patrick Kinsella, born on this date in 1935 (he died in 2016), is a Canadian novelist and
short story writer whose work usually focused on First Nations
people and baseball. For a
truly wonderful read about life on the First Nations’ Reserve in
Kinsella’s home province of Alberta, check out
Dance Me Outside, his very first book from 1977. Narrated by a young Cree
named Silas Ermineskin, it is a remarkable look at Reserve life, love, sorrow
and triumph.
But while he writes poignantly and
with great detail about the First Nations, it is for his 1982 baseball novel Shoeless
Joe that he gained international acclaim.
Kinsella 
The book was mildly controversial in that
it used the reclusive (and still living at the time) author J.D. Salinger
as one of its main characters, even though Kinsella had never met him.
"I made sure to make him a nice character so that he couldn’t sue me.”
Kinsella said. The best-selling book was later adapted into
the wonderful 1989 Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams, further
cementing Kinsella’s reputation.
“Most writers are unhappy with film
adaptations of their work, and rightly so,” Kinsella said. “But Field
of Dreams caught the spirit and essence of Shoeless Joe while making the necessary changes to make the work
more visual.”
Primarily set in Iowa it has one of the great literary exchanges when one of the old-time “spirit”
ballplayers he creates emerges from a cornfield and asks the main character Ray if this is Heaven? “No,” Ray
answers. “It's Iowa.”
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