A Study Guide for W. P. Kinsella's "The Thrill of Grass"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for W. P. Kinsella's "The Thrill of Grass," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535840057

Book preview

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The Thrill of the Grass

W. P. Kinsella

1984

Introduction

The Thrill of the Grass, by W. P. Kinsella was published in a short story collection of the same name in 1984. It is Kinsella's seventh book and the third about baseball, following his best-selling Shoeless Joe. Narrated by a nameless, first-person narrator, The Thrill of the Grass takes place during the hiatus in play caused by the 1981 baseball strike. In a semi-magical fashion, the narrator discovers a secret door into the ballpark and leads a dreamlike project in which men appear at the door every night, bearing gifts of real grass with which to replace the hated artificial turf in the stadium. Like most of Kinsella's baseball stories, it portrays baseball as a romantic pastime and followers of the game as fellow believers in a secular religion.

Although Kinsella is Canadian, he fell in love with baseball when attending and then teaching at the University of Iowa, and many of his baseball stories are set in small midwestern cities. While not as well-known as Shoeless Joe, which was later adapted into the movie Field of Dreams, the short stories in The Thrill of the Grass have been widely anthologized.

Author Biography

William Patrick (W. P.) Kinsella was born in Alberta, Canada, on May 25, 1935, to John Matthew and Olive Mary (Elliot) Kinsella. For the first ten years of his life, he lived in a log cabin sixty miles from Edmonton, Canada. Because of the isolation, his parents home schooled him. When he was ten, the family moved to Edmonton and Kinsella described the transition to public school as deeply disorienting. Kinsella's father fell ill and died of stomach cancer during his last year of high school. For the next few years, Kinsella worked and in 1957 he married Myrna Sails. Their daughters, Shannon and Erin, were born in 1958 and 1961 respectively. In 1963, he and Myrna divorced and Kinsella was a single parent until he married Mickey Heming in 1965. In 1967 the Kinsellas moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where Kinsella ran a pizza parlor for several years. In 1970 he started taking classes at the University of Victoria from which he graduated in 1974 with a degree in creative writing. He was thirty-five years old. He had sold his