shoeless joe :: essays research papers

W.P. Kinsella William Patrick Kinsella was born may 25, 1935 in Edmonton, Alberta. His father was a contractor and his mother was a printer. As an only child, Kinsella spent his early years in a log cabin near Lac Ste.-Anne, sixty miles northwest of Edmonton. He rarely saw other children and completed grades one through four by correspondence. " Having no contact with children, I considered myself a small adult" (Authors and writers for young adults, 130-131). His parents, grandmother, and aunt read to each other and told stories, Kinsella began writing fantasies when he was five or six; mostly baseball fantasies. Why did Kinsella like to write about baseball so much? The family moved to Edmonton when he was ten, and his father, a former Semi pro baseball player began taking him to baseball games. In eighth grade, Kinsella won a prize for "Diamond Doom," a baseball mystery. At age eighteen, he published his first story, a science fiction tale about a totalitarian society, in the Alberta Civil Service Bulletin. Kinsella worked as a government clerk, manager of a retail credit company, account executive for the City of Edmonton, owner of a n Italian restaurant, and taxicab driver while attending the University of Victoria where he received a B.A. in 1974. Then he attended a writer's workshop at the University of Iowa, earning a master of fine arts degree in 1978. He taught at the University of Calgary from 1978 to 1983. But he hated the academic life so he quit to write full time. Kinsella was married to Mildred Clay from 1965 to 1978. He married the writer Ann Knight in 1978 and they settled in White Rock, British Columbia and Iowa City, Iowa when not traveling to attend major league baseball games. Kinsella has two daughters, Shannon and Erin. In 1982 Kinsella wrote a best selling novel, "Shoeless Joe". "Kinsellas 1982 mythical baseball fable drew on the author's long-term love of the game" ( Wilson, Kathleen. 229). This book is about a middle-aged man that lives on a farm with his wife, Annie and daughter, Karin. One day when this man, Ray Kinsella, is walking through his cornfields he hears the voice of an major league baseball announcer. It says, " if you build it, he will come". Ray soon finds out that "it" is a baseball field and "he" is Rays father who used to play AAA ball.