W. P. Kinsella

Perhaps best known as the author of the book upon which the movie "Field of Dreams" (1989) was based, author W.P. Kinsella was born William Patrick Kinsella in Alberta, Canada in 1935. Though he was a bright student, he didn't enroll in college until his 30s, and it was only around this time that he began devoting major amounts of time and energy to writing. He went on to pursue an MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writer's Workshop, emerging with his first book, 1977's Dance Me Outside, a collection of short stories written from the perspective of a young Cree man describing life on a First Nations reserve. (It was later the basis of Canadian director Bruce McDonald's "On the Rez" (1994).) His first novella would come in 1982; a magical realism story about baseball called Shoeless Joe, which would be adapted into "Field of Dreams" seven years later. Kinsella would return to baseball again with 1986's Iowa Baseball Confederacy, and again to issues of native peoples with The Fencepost Chronicles that same year. Tragically, Kinsella was hit by a car while walking in 1999, resulting in brain injuries that deprived him of his senses of taste and smell, as well as the ability to concentrate. He took a 14-year hiatus from writing after the accident but he eventually returned to the craft, publishing Butterfly Winter in 2011.Kinsella died in 2016. He was 81 years old.