W P Kinsella
Canadian writer whose novel of baseball became the box-office smash Field of Dreams
WP KINSELLA, who has died aged 81, was a Canadian author whose novels included Shoeless Joe, later adapted for the screen as Field of Dreams.
It tells of a farmer in Iowa, Ray Kinsella, who hears a mysterious voice in a cornfield. In the story’s most famous line, it urges: “If you build it, he will come.” When Kinsella ploughs under the crop to make a baseball diamond it summons the shade of his hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson.
Jackson’s brilliant career ended when in 1919 he was caught up in the sport’s most notorious scandal, an agreement by other players on his team, the Chicago White Sox, to fix the World Series. The extent of Jackson’s involvement has been much debated, and in the novel he is given the chance to play the sport again.
The book’s redemptive theme appealed to readers and it won awards in Canada after its publication in 1982. When it was filmed seven years later, with Kevin Costner as Kinsella and Ray Liotta as Shoeless Joe, it became a huge box-office success and gathered several Oscar nominations.
Its producers decided, however, to make several changes from the novel. Kinsella had made one of the main characters in it his fellow writer J D Salinger. The author of The Catcher
in the Rye was outraged at this liberty, and Kinsella admitted he had portrayed the notoriously reclusive Salinger positively so as not to be sued.
Accordingly, in the film the writer that Ray Kinsella seeks out is called Terence Mann, played by James Earl Jones. The producers judged that omitting Salinger was no great risk since research showed that most readers of the book did not know that he was a real person.
The title of the film was also new, but this turned out to meet with Kinsella’s approval. He revealed that in fact the publishers had substituted “Shoeless Joe” for the title that he had originally wanted – The Dream Field.
William Patrick Kinsella was born in Edmonton, Alberta, on May 25 1935. His father was a plasterer and his mother a printer. It was she who largely educated him during his early childhood, which he spent on a remote homestead.
He first went to school when he was 10 after his parents moved into Edmonton. It was then that he encountered baseball (although his father had played at minor league level). At 14, he won a YMCA writing competition, but he later commented that about the only literature he was taught at school was a single Shakespeare play.
On leaving, he entered work, had a family and for the next 20 years held a series of jobs which included driving a taxi, managing a credit bureau, selling advertising space in Yellow Pages and running a pizzeria. Eventually, in 1970 he went to the University of Victoria and aged almost 40 gained a creative writing degree. He later took a course at the University of Iowa, where he saw the landscape in which he was to set Shoeless Joe.
From 1978 to 1983, Kinsella taught English literature at the University of Calgary before the success of Shoeless
Joe allowed him to become a full-time author. Most of his output of some 30 books came in the form of short stories, with baseball forming a common theme, as Kinsella liked the boundless possibilities inherent in sport and, by extension, in life.
Another source of inspiration was Canada’s indigenous peoples, known as the First Nations. He gave short shrift to those who criticised him for writing from their point of view as “cultural appropriation”, maintaining that an author must have the freedom to use his imagination.
In 1996, Kinsella was watching the Oscars ceremony when he was surprised to see the award for the Best Live Action Short Film go to
Liebermann in Love, based on a story of his. He was surprised mainly because he had no idea that it was being filmed and had not been contacted for permission by the producers, who later apologised.
The following year, he was knocked down by a car while out for a walk and suffered head injuries. Kinsella had a reputation as something of a curmudgeon – he sued the writer Evelyn Lau, with whom he had had a relationship, when she wrote about it – but the accident made his temperament much more that of a recluse. For the next 15 years he did not publish, preferring instead to play competitive Scrabble. In 2011, however, a new novel,
Butterfly Winter, appeared, and his last work, Russian Dolls, a series of interlinked stories, is due to be published later this year.
Bill Kinsella, who suffered from diabetes, ended his own life after invoking Canada’s recently introduced law allowing the terminally ill to choose the time of their death with the assistance of a doctor.
His fourth wife Barbara died in 2012. He is survived by his two daughters.