Like Grant Wood’s American Gothic or Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, Kinsella’s fable has become part of Iowa’s cultural heritage. Today, (five years after Kinsella’s death in 2016), both the book and film are revered classics-love letters to Iowa, literature, and baseball. “They love baseball, and they think it stands for an earlier, simpler time when professional sports were still games and not industries.” ( P-0180) Home to the Field of Dreams Movie Site in Dyersville, Iowa. Kinsella, are dealing with stuff that’s close to the heart (it can’t be a coincidence that the author and the hero have the same last name),” said Ebert in his review. “The director, Phil Alden Robinson, and the writer, W. Film critic Roger Ebert gave it four stars. And the rest, as they say, is history.įield of Dreams opened on April 21, 1989, to rave reviews. After reading just a brief synopsis, Kessenich urged Kinsella to turn his short story into a novel.

The following year, the piece appeared in an anthology of short stories, and an advanced review in Publisher’s Weekly caught the eye of a young editorial assistant named Larry Kessenich at Houghton Mifflin. Kinsella read his short story, titled “ Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa” aloud for the first time at the next Iowa City Creative Reading meeting – one week before leaving Iowa City! He’d accepted a teaching position at the University of Calgary that would begin in the fall. I wondered, ‘What would happen if Shoeless Joe Jackson came back in this time and place, which was Iowa City in the spring of 1978 ?’ At first, it was simply a lyrical 20-page short story, where Joe Jackson, the infamous White Sox player who was accused of game-fixing in the 1919 World Series, materializes like a phantom ballplayer from the corn. It was the story that would change his life-and Iowa-forever. (M-0030) During his second year of graduate school, Kinsella began working on a new story inspired by Iowa City, the 1919 Black Sox, and his complicated relationship with his father.

Shoeless joe jackson kinsella