The work of novelist William Kennedy marks the union of encyclopedic knowledge, built over ninety-eight years spent soaking up the city of Albany, and a profound empathy for human experience in all its forms, from the underworld of gangsters, gamblers, and hustlers to the heights of power and politics.
In the recently published Library of America edition of The Albany Trilogy, three of Kennedy’s greatest works set in New York’s capital take readers through vastly different but interrelated lives.
Legs reconstructs the real-life exploits of a notorious celebrity criminal. Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game pits a small-time crook against the brutal power of the city’s political machine. And in Kennedy’s Ironweed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award, a broken man — Billy Phelan’s father — returns home looking to make peace with a lifetime of damage and disappointment.
Recently, Paul Grondahl, who edited the Library of America edition (one of the very few published during the author’s lifetime) and serves as director of the New York State Writers Institute at University of Albany, which Kennedy helped found, discussed his mentor’s remarkable memory, the annus mirabilis that followed Ironweed’s out-of-the-blue success, and Kennedy’s morning writing ritual, kept to this day.
You can read the interview here. Also, check out the William Kennedy playlist at the Writers Institute’s YouTube channel.
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