W. P. Kinsella - Literary Life

Literary Life

According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, W.P. Kinsella's literary output primarily consists of two cycles of work dealing with two fictive universes: those dealing with baseball and those depicting the indigenous people of Canada. Kinsella's first published book was called Dance Me Outside (1977), which was a collection of seventeen short stories about the lives of people on a First Nations reserve in his native Alberta. Kinsella was criticized for writing from the point-of-view of Native people, appropriating their voice. Kinsella rejected the criticism on the grounds that a writer has the license to create anything they so chose.

These stories use the ineptness of the white bureaucrats on reservations as background, and Kinsella defended them, saying, "It's the oppressed and the oppressor that I write about. The way that oppressed people survive is by making fun of the people who oppress them. That is essentially what my Indian stories are all about."

In the field of baseball, Kinsella has written nearly 40 short stories and three novels. Shoeless Joe (1982), his first novel, blends fantasy and magical realism to tell the story of a poor Iowa farmer who, yielding to voices in his head, builds a baseball field in his corn field that attracts the spirits of the 1919 Chicago White Sox. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1986), another book blending fantasy and magical realism, recounts an epic baseball game a minor league team played against the 1908 World's Champion Chicago Cubs. Box Socials (1991), an evocation of life in rural Alberta during the Great Depression and World War II, features a growing boy as its protagonist and the adventure of a hometown baseball hero who gets to bat against the great pitcher legend Bob Feller.

Shoeless Joe remains Kinsella's most famous work. The book was mildly controversial in that it used a living person, the reclusive author J.D. Salinger, as one of its main characters. Kinsella, who had never met him, created a wholly imagined character (aside from his being a recluse) based on the author of The Catcher in the Rye, a book that had great meaning to him when he was a young man. To get a feel for Salinger, he re-read his body of work.

"I made sure to make him a nice character so that he couldn’t sue me."

In an example of metafiction, he named his protagonist in Shoeless Joe "Ray Kinsella", a character from Salinger’s uncollected story “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All.” Salinger had also used the surname shared by writer and protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye (Holden Caulfield's friend Richard Kinsella).

Known for his litigiousness, Salinger contacted Kinsella's publisher via his attorneys to express outrage over having been portrayed in Shoeless Joe. Kinsella denied that Salinger, as a writer, had any real influence on his own writing, despite rumors to the contrary. (Some rumors held that Kinsella had actually met Salinger in person.)

Shoeless Joe won Kinsella the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and the Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1982. The book garnered good reviews, sold very well, and was made into a popular movie.