Shoeless Joe
Shoeless Joe WP Kinsella wrote Shoeless Joe in 1982. The novel was the source for the popular movie, Field of Dreams, in 1988. Shoeless Joe is the story of Ray Kinsella, an avid baseball fan, and the journey he takes and the lengths he goes to fulfill a dream. The Journey takes Ray too many different places around the Northeast; and even places he thought his mind would never go. Ray Kinsella is your typical mid-west farmer. He and his wife Annie have a daughter and a small corn farm in the middle of Iowa. An area fit for farming, not an area fit a baseball field. Ray is content with his life. As a former insurance salesman, Ray doesn’t greatly enjoy farming, but he loves his family. The Kinsella family makes enough money at the farm to just get by and survive as they are consistently being harassed to sell the farm to Annie’s brother, Mark, and his partners. The consistent answer has always been no. The denial of Mark’s proposal became even more eminent when Ray started hearing the voices and following his dream. “If you build it, he will come.” Such a powerful phrase. A phrase that was so powerful that it drove Ray to plow under his precious crop to build, of all things, a baseball field. A crazy thought for any farmer. Many farmers in the Midwest struggle just to make ends meat, they use every inch of land possible to farm. Who would build a baseball field in the middle of nowhere, in land needed for “more important things?” Well, regardless of the illogical thought of doing this, and with the support of his wife, Ray started to work on the baseball field. Eventually the one he thought he was building the field for, the great “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, who died some thirty years before the field was ever thought of, appeared from the corn field and onto the baseball field. The sight of this would put anyone in awe and sure enough it did and pushed Ray to continue on. During the rest of the construction of the field, Ray had to interpret other