Other editions of book SHOELESS JOE: FIELD OF DREAMS

Joseph Jefferson Jackson (July 16, 1887 – December 5, 1951), nicknamed "Shoeless Joe", was an American outfielder who played Major League Baseball in the early part of the 20th century. He is remembered for his performance on the field and for his alleged association with the Black Sox Scandal, in which members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox participated in a conspiracy to fix the World Series. As a result of Jackson's association with the scandal, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Major League Baseball's first commissioner, banned Jackson from playing after the 1920 season. Since then, Jackson's guilt has been disputed, and his expulsion from baseball during the prime of his career made him one of the game's legendary figures.

Shoeless Joe, the soul-stirring novel on which the movie Field of Dreams is based, is more than just another baseball story. Kinsella captures the spiritual dimension that baseball represents for its most determined devotees in this tale on love and the power dreams have to make people come alive. "Shoeless Joe" is the great Joe Jackson, one of the eight members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox who were banned from baseball for throwing the World Series. One day, while out in his cornfield, Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella hears the voice of a baseball announcer saying, "If you build it, he will come." "He," of course, is Ray's hero, Joe Jackson. "It" is a baseball stadium, which Ray carves out of his cornfield. In doing this, he also inadvertently provides us with an amazing and somewhat nostalgic story on America's perhaps most beloved national pastimes, baseball.