A short life of the author
William Kennedy is the laureate of Albany, New York — a writer who has spent his entire career transforming a city most Americans think of as a political backwater into one of the great imagined places in American literature. His Albany Cycle — a series of interconnected novels spanning from the 1840s to the 1960s, tracing the fortunes and misfortunes of the Irish-American families of Albany through generations of political corruption, bootlegging, labour strife, love, madness, and redemption — is one of the most ambitious and most accomplished bodies of work in contemporary American fiction. The cycle’s masterpiece, Ironweed, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and was adapted into a film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, and Kennedy was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship — recognition that came only after years of critical neglect and commercial failure that nearly ended his career.
Albany
William Joseph Kennedy was born in 1928 in Albany, New York, into an Irish-American family with deep roots in the city’s political and social life. He grew up in the North End, the working-class Irish neighbourhood that would become the primary setting of his fiction. He attended Siena College, served in the Army, and worked as a journalist — first in Albany, then in Puerto Rico, then back in Albany — before turning to fiction.
The journalism was essential preparation. Kennedy learned to see Albany not as a provincial backwater but as a place with its own history, its own mythology, its own cast of extraordinary characters — the ward heelers and bookies, the saloon keepers and gangsters, the prizefighters and priests who constituted the human landscape of Albany’s Irish-American community.
The Albany Cycle
The Ink Truck (1969) was Kennedy’s first novel — a comic, surreal account of a newspaper strike that drew on his own journalistic experience. But the Albany Cycle properly began with Legs (1975), a novel about the gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond, who operated in the Albany area during Prohibition. Kennedy depicted Diamond not as a conventional crime-fiction villain but as a figure of mythic dimensions — a man whose charisma, violence, and capacity for survival made him a dark embodiment of the American dream.
Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978) moved the focus from the criminal underworld to the political machine, depicting a few days in the life of Billy Phelan, a small-time pool hustler and bookie who is drawn into a kidnapping crisis involving the son of Albany’s most powerful political family — a family transparently modelled on the O’Connell machine that dominated Albany politics for decades.
Ironweed
Ironweed (1983) was Kennedy’s masterpiece — a novel about Francis Phelan, Billy’s father, a former baseball player who has been living as a bum on the streets of Albany for twenty-two years, haunted by the ghosts of the people he has killed or abandoned. The novel followed Francis through a few days of Depression-era Albany as he confronted his past — the infant son he accidentally dropped and killed, the wife and family he abandoned, the men he killed in self-defence — and struggled to decide whether redemption was possible or whether his exile was permanent.
The novel was an extraordinary achievement. Kennedy rendered the world of Depression-era homelessness with a physical vividness — the cold, the hunger, the stink, the casual violence — that was unflinching, while simultaneously investing Francis’s journey with a mythic dimension. Francis was Odysseus among the dead, a man returning from the underworld, and Kennedy’s use of ghosts — the dead who appear to Francis, who talk to him, who accuse and forgive him — gave the novel a metaphysical resonance that elevated it far beyond social realism.
The Later Novels
Kennedy continued the Albany Cycle with Quinn’s Book (1988), set during the Civil War era; Very Old Bones (1992), which explored the Phelan family’s past; The Flaming Corsage (1996), set at the turn of the century; and Roscoe (2002), a novel about the Albany political machine. Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (2011) ranged from 1936 Albany to 1957 Cuba to 1968 Albany. Each novel extended the cycle’s chronological and thematic range, building an increasingly dense web of family connections, historical events, and recurring characters.
O Albany! (1983) was Kennedy’s nonfiction love letter to his city — a collection of essays, reportage, and personal memoir that provided the factual and emotional foundation for the fictional cycle.
The Saul Bellow Rescue
The story of Ironweed’s publication is one of the most famous near-misses in American literary history. The manuscript was rejected by thirteen publishers before Saul Bellow — who had read Kennedy’s earlier novels and admired them — wrote a letter to Viking Press on Kennedy’s behalf, essentially shaming them into reading the book. Viking published it; it won the Pulitzer Prize. The episode illustrates the precariousness of serious literary fiction in the American marketplace: a writer of Kennedy’s calibre was nearly silenced not by lack of talent but by the inability of commercial publishing to recognise work that didn’t fit conventional marketing categories. Kennedy’s Albany novels were too literary for crime fiction readers, too Irish-American for the literary establishment’s cosmopolitan tastes, and too provincial in setting for a culture that equated seriousness with New York or the South. Bellow’s intervention was an act of literary generosity that changed American fiction.
Collecting Kennedy
The Ink Truck (Dial Press, 1969) is the primary collecting target — Kennedy’s first novel, published in a small first printing. Legs (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1975) and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (Viking, 1978) are also scarce in first edition. Ironweed (Viking, 1983) is the most widely collected as the Pulitzer winner.