Kennedy, William
Kennedy, William( 1928– ),Albany-born novelist. Albany, New York, is the setting for all Kennedy's books, the most celebrated being Ironweed (1983, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize). In sharply evocative realistic prose it tells of the return to Albany in the 1930s of a onetime major league pitcher, Francis Phelan, now an alcoholic bum, and his episodes in and out of reality. Legs (1975) is a novelistic treatment of the gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond. Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978) is again about familiar characters in Depression Albany. Other novels in the Albany cycle are Quinn's Book (1988), set in the Civil War period; The Flaming Corsage (1996), which covers roughly four decades beginning in the 1880s; and Roscoe (2002), which stretches from the 1920s to the 1940s. The novel Very Old Bones (1992) digs into the author's own past and family history. Three essay and journalism...
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