Shoeless Joe (novel)
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First edition
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| Author | W.P. Kinsella |
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| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Sport Fantasy |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
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Publication date
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1982 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover, paperback, e-book) |
| Pages | 265 (paperback edition) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 7947139 |
| 813/.54 19 | |
| LC Class | PR9199.3.K443 S49 1982 |
Shoeless Joe is a magic realist novel by Canadian author W. P. Kinsella. It became much better known due to its film adaptation, Field of Dreams. The book was written as Kinsella attended a writers workshop in Iowa, and decided to incorporate the stories he told about the Black Sox Scandal, imagining if Shoeless Joe Jackson came back to the same city Kinsella was living in, Iowa City.
Ray Kinsella lives and farms in Iowa where he grows corn with his wife Annie and their five-year-old daughter Karin. Kinsella is obsessed with the beauty and history of American baseball, specifically the plight of his hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and the Black Sox Scandal of the 1919 World Series. When he hears a voice telling him to build a baseball field in the midst of his corn crop in order to give his hero a chance at redemption, he blindly follows instructions. The field becomes a conduit to the spirits of baseball legends. Soon, Kinsella is off on a cross-country trip to ease the pain of another hero, the reclusive writer J.D. Salinger, as part of a journey the Philadelphia Inquirer called "not so much about baseball as it's about dreams, magic, life, and what is quintessentially American."
Shoeless Joe was the winner of the 1982 Books in Canada First Novel Award and a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. In 2011, the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame awarded Kinsella the Jack Graney Award for a significant contribution to the game of baseball in Canada through a life's work or a singular outstanding achievement.
Shoeless Joe was later adapted into the 1989 film Field of Dreams by Phil Alden Robinson. The original working title of the film was Shoeless Joe, like the book. The original title of the book was Dream Field, but the publisher renamed it Shoeless Joe.
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