I'm pulling most of this from Wikipedia, but I've read about the origins of the Field of Dreams novel & author several times (despite never reading the book).

• The author W.P. Kinsella, was a Canadian born on an Alberta homestead to Irish parents in 1935.
• He lived on a farm in rural Alberta before moving to the major center of Edmonton, Alberta until age 10. He was initially homeschooled and didn't start public education until Grade 5.
• He later moved further west as an adult to British Columbia. He didn't attend university until age 35 in the capital of Victoria, BC on Vancouver Island.
• In the late 70s, he attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop for a Master of Fine Arts, which was the basis for the short story and eventual longer novel of 265 pages Shoeless Joe (1982) that would later be adapted into Field of Dreams.
• Despite hailing from the Western Canadian provinces of Alberta & BC without much of a baseball history, he wrote 3 novels & 40 short stories about baseball. Shoeless Joe was his first such novel and most successful.
• His other obsession was writing about Indians. Even in 1990 the chugs were big mad about his cultural appropriation. Despite spending a lot of time on the Left Coast, he essentially told them at the time to shove it, that he could write about any topic he liked as a fantasy writer.
• Some of his other work about Indians was later adapted into a Canadian CBC TV show called The Rez from '96-'98 that I have no recollection of.
• The OG novel had IRL reclusive author JD Salinger as the James Earl Jones/Terrance Mann character. Hollywood execs changed it for fear of litigation. They felt the change was irrelevant, estimating only 15% of the audience would recognize JD Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, as an IRL figure, assuming most would consider him imaginary.
• The Canadian author Kinsella had a weird relationship with the JD Salinger character in his novel. He chose the Kevin Costner lead character in the novel to be named Ray Kinsella, sharing his surname and lifted as a character from one of Salinger's short stories as well. There's also a character with the Kinsella in The Catcher in the Rye, who is the protagonist Holden Caufield's roommate.
• Despite claiming to have read JD Salinger's entire catalogue in preparation to write Shoeless Joe, WP Kinsella claims the Salinger character in his seminal novel shares no similarities with the IRL author besides being famous & being a recluse. It's possible that this denial is simply a legal strategy, as Salinger living at the time of the novel's publishing in 1982 did reach out to WP Kinsella's publisher noting displeasure of being portrayed in fiction and threatening legal action.
• IRL, JD Salinger's mother was also from Iowa
• WP Kinsella started playing competitive Scrabble after becoming disillusioned with MLB Baseball after the 1994 strike
• In 1997, WP Kinsella suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury by being struck by a vehicle as a pedestrian. He claimed it changed his personality and motivation, stopping him from producing any new work for 14 years.
• One of WP Kinsella's short stories "Lieberman in Love" about a character called Joe Lieberman (unclear if based on the IRL politician) falling in love with a prostitute in Hawaii was later adapted into a film that won an Oscar. Kinsella wasn't credited whatsoever, though a newspaper ad was later run to correct the oversight.
• Salinger died in 2010, Kinsella in 2016. In true Leaf pioneering fashion, he offed himself with MAiD just 2 months after it became law.
• The Moonlight Graham baseball player in the novel is based off an IRL person who debuted in 1905, later became a medical doctor in Chisholm, MN and died in 1965.