W. P. Kinsella

1935–2016 · Canadian novelist & short-story writer

William Patrick Kinsella (1935–2016) was a Canadian novelist and short-story writer who developed his baseball fiction while attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His debut novel Shoeless Joe (1982) — expanded from his 1980 short story “Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa” — won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and the Books in Canada First Novel Award. He wrote the sentence the world now quotes; the 1989 film adaptation made it famous and, in doing so, quietly took the credit.

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“If you build it, they will come”

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