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
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“... fiction never exceeds the reach of the writer’s courage.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)