In Fiction
In 1975, author W. P. Kinsella happened to notice Graham's entry in The Baseball Encyclopedia. He made note of his unusual career, and then incorporated Graham as a character in his 1982 novel Shoeless Joe, on which the movie Field of Dreams was based.
In the novel, the dates of Graham's big-league appearance and death are kept as in real life, making the 1905 appearance 74 years prior to the book's 1979 timeframe, and the Ray Kinsella character quickly finds out that Graham has been dead since 1965. The time-travel scene has Kinsella meeting Graham in 1955, ten years prior to Graham's death.
In the movie, the Fenway Park scoreboard shows Graham's appearance as having taken place in 1922, 66 years prior to the film's 1988 timeframe. A woman in Minnesota familiar with Graham later says Graham had died in 1972. In the time-travel sequence of the movie, lead character Ray Kinsella goes back to the year of Graham's death, and is told that his appearance was at the end of the season, rather than the middle. In the background of the scene on the street when Ray and Moonlight meet, the Plaza Theatre sign shows The Godfather is playing, and Ray notices a poster calling for Richard Nixon's re-election as President of the United States.
Read more about this topic: Moonlight Graham
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“Coincidence is a pimp and a cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvelous artist in the patterns of facts recollected by a non-ordinary memorist.”
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“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
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