A Study Guide for W. P. Kinsella's "Shoeless Joe"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for W. P. Kinsella's "Shoeless Joe," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels 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 Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535833059

Book preview

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Shoeless Joe

W. P. Kinsella

1982

Introduction

Canadian writer W. P. Kinsella's first novel, Shoeless Joe, published in Boston in 1982, is an ingenious baseball story that smoothly weaves together fact and fantasy. The narrator, Ray Kinsella, is a baseball fanatic and dreamer who owns a farm in Iowa. One day he hears a mysterious voice saying, If you build it, he will come. Ray believes this is an instruction to build a baseball field at his farm and that the he is his father's hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson, one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Jackson was banned from baseball for life following the Black Sox Scandal of 1919, in which he and seven other players accepted bribes to throw the World Series. From this premise, Kinsella spins his tale full of magic and nostalgia. Shoeless Joe shows up, and Ray continues to pursue his dream, even traveling cross-country to kidnap the reclusive writer J. D. Salinger, who joins Ray in his quest to restore the broken dreams of the past.

Set in idyllic rural Iowa and told in lyrical, poetic, sometimes sentimental prose, Shoeless Joe is a story of the power of the imagination and the triumph of love. It is about dreams and hope and trust and the fulfillment of long-buried desires. The dominant note throughout is the characters' consuming love of baseball, which is presented almost as a religion, and is contrasted, favorably, with the spiritual dryness of conventional Christianity.

Shoeless Joe was made into the popular movie Field of Dreams in 1989, and for a while the words If you build it, he will come became almost as well-known in American popular culture as the famous phrase Say it ain't so, Joe, allegedly spoken by a young fan to Shoeless Joe during the Black Sox Scandal.

Author Biography

William Patrick Kinsella was born on May 25, 1935, on a farm in Edmonton, in northern Alberta, Canada, the son of John Matthew and Olive Mary (Elliott) Kinsella. Kinsella did not attend school until fifth grade, but he caught up quickly and graduated from high school in 1953. After graduation, he worked at a variety of jobs in Edmonton. He was a government clerk, an insurance investigator, and then owner of a restaurant. He did not attend college until he was in