William Kennedy

Author

• Born: January 16, 1928
• Place of Birth: Albany, New York

Biography

When Viking Press finally agreed to publish Ironweed in 1983, the third novel in The Albany Cycle, William Kennedy achieved a measure of critical applause and popular recognition that few contemporary American novelists have enjoyed. Kennedy was born in Albany on January 16, 1928, the son of a deputy sheriff, William Joseph Kennedy, and his wife, Mary McDonald, a secretary. He grew up in an Irish-Catholic, working-class section of the city, and the gritty, realistic experiences of this early life provided him with the details that make his Albany novels such powerful re-creations of a Depression-era America. In the sixth grade, Kennedy was given a toy printing press and quickly decided to become a journalist. During his high school years at Christian Brothers Academy, he wrote for the school paper, The Sentry, and read the work of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Damon Runyon.

After high school, Kennedy attended Siena College, a small Franciscan college near Albany. During this time, he concentrated on developing his journalistic style, editing the Siena News, and functioning as the associate editor of another school publication, Beverwyck. After graduating in 1949, he began his newspaper career as an assistant sports editor and columnist with the Post Star in Glen Falls, New York. Kennedy entered the U.S. Army in 1950. Serving in the Fourth Infantry Division, he went to Europe as a sports editor and columnist for Army newspapers. In 1952, he returned to Albany and became a general assignment reporter for the Albany Times-Union. As a journalist, Kennedy rediscovered Albany, and in the four years he spent at the newspaper, he divided his time between reportorial duties and working on his own short fiction. This period of apprenticeship was crucial for Kennedy, for it proved his commitment to a literary career and shaped his versatile command of language.

In 1956, Kennedy moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he became the assistant managing editor of the Puerto Rico World Journal. The small paper suffered from distribution and advertising problems and ceased publication within a year. In 1957, Kennedy married the actress and dancer Ana Daisy Segarra (whose stage name was Dana Sosa) and moved to Miami, where he continued to work as a reporter. He returned to San Juan in 1957, and in 1959, he founded the San Juan Star with Bill Dorvillier. In 1961, Kennedy resigned from the newspaper to devote himself full-time to writing fiction. He began working on a novel about Albany entitled “The Angels and the Sparrows.” He failed to find a publisher for the work, but the experience was important for him. He decided to end his expatriate existence in Puerto Rico, to focus his energies on “serious fiction,” and to return to Albany.

After accomplishing the return to Albany in 1963, he initially worked for the Times-Union as a special writer. In 1963 and 1964, he wrote twenty-six articles about the ethnic neighborhoods of Albany, a series he later revised and published as O Albany! An Urban Tapestry. In 1965, Kennedy received an NAACP award (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Albany slums. From 1968 to 1970, he was a film critic for the Albany Times-Union.

Kennedy’s first novel, The Ink Truck, is an experimental work based on the surrealist and expressionist visions of such writers as Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. The next novel, Legs, a chaotic “documentary” about the exhilarating life and violent death of the gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond, earned a positive critical reception and created an audience eager to read more about Kennedy’s Albany. The next two novels in The Albany Cycle, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game and Ironweed, further demonstrated Kennedy’s ability to create imaginative and exciting fictional worlds rooted in Albany’s Depression-era culture.

In Quinn’s Book, Kennedy abandoned the Depression era, choosing instead to set the novel in mid-nineteenth century Albany. Although the historical framework changed, Quinn’s Book is, in other respects, similar to Kennedy’s other work. Through the eyes of the narrator, Daniel Quinn, the reader encounters a world where the material and the spiritual are joined, a world that is both a vividly realistic landscape of nineteenth-century America and a richly fantastic world of the imagination. Kennedy continued the Albany Cycle with Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe.

Kennedy was appointed to the faculty of the State University of New York at Albany in 1983 and, in the same year, founded a writers’ institute there. His many awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1981 and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1983. In 1983, Ironweed was named the best book of fiction by the National Book Critics Circle, and in 1984, Kennedy was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Albany honored Kennedy in September 1984 with “A City-Wide Celebration of Albany and William Kennedy.” During these years, Kennedy also began to be involved with cinema and wrote the screenplays for film versions of The Cotton Club and Ironweed.

Characteristic features that dominate Kennedy’s work include the primacy of visual spectacle, the use of the past, the frequent and shocking images of violence and sex, and the delicate mix of realism and surrealism. His novels are populated with troubled characters seeking inner peace, a last grasp for salvation. In Ironweed, Kennedy defined this peace as a moment of stillness when the central character, Francis Phelan, finds refuge from the dizzying chaos of his desperate life. Fascinated by Albany, the past, and the worlds of the working class and “outsiders,” Kennedy typically focuses on troubled father-and-son relationships or difficult relationships between men and women. His novels are further characterized by his vigorous experiments with language and by his ability to create sympathetic characters. Above all, however, his ability to evoke a particular place, a small corner of America as it has changed over time, has assured Kennedy a place as a significant contemporary American novelist.

In 2012, Kennedy, still writing into his eighties, published a critically praised novel that once again has Albany as a setting but also devotes part of its story to Cuba. Including Ernest Hemingway and Fidel Castro as characters, Kennedy's Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (2012) tells the story of an Irish American man and his Cuban wife throughout the revolution in Cuba and into the civil rights era in the United States. The book was seen as a welcome addition to the Albany Cycle, particularly as it had been almost a decade since the last installment. Later, just before his eighty-seventh birthday, his play The Light of the World premiered in 2014 at the Capital Repertory Theatre. Into his late nineties, Kennedy continued his involvement in the literary world, participating in readings and local literature events.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

The Ink Truck, 1969

Legs, 1975

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, 1978

Ironweed, 1983

The Albany Cycle, 1985 (includes Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, and Ironweed)

Quinn’s Book, 1988 (continues the Albany Cycle)

Very Old Bones, 1992 (continues the Albany Cycle)

The Flaming Corsage, 1996 (continues the Albany Cycle)

Roscoe, 2002 (continues the Albany Cycle)

Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, 2012 (continues the Albany Cycle)

Short Fiction:

“The Secrets of Creative Love,” 1983

“An Exchange of Gifts,” 1985

“A Cataclysm of Love,” 1986

Siren’s Lullaby, 1998

Screenplays:

The Cotton Club, 1984 (with Francis Coppola and Mario Puzo)

Ironweed, 1987 (adaptation of his novel)

Grand View, 1996

In the System, 2003

The Light of the World, 2014

Nonfiction:

Getting It All, Saving It All: Some Notes by an Extremist, 1978

O Albany! An Urban Tapestry, 1983 (also known as O Albany! Improbable City of Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated Scoundrels, 1983)

The Capitol in Albany, 1986

Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction, 1993

Conversations with William Kennedy, 1997 (Neila C. Seshachari, editor)

Children’s/Young Adult Literature:

Charlie Malarkey and the Belly Button Machine, 1986 (with Brendan Kennedy)

Charlie Malarkey and the Singing Moose, 1994

Bibliography

Allen, Douglas R., and Mona Simpson. “The Art of Fiction CXI: William Kennedy.” The Paris Review, 1989, www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2391/the-art-of-fiction-no-111-william-kennedy. Accessed 20 July 2024.

"Biography." Albany University, www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/wjk/biography.html. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Faulkner, Donald W. William Kennedy: Conversations and Interpretations. State University of New York Press, 2006.

Giamo, Benedict. The Homeless of “Ironweed”: Blossoms on the Crag. University of Iowa Press, 1996.

Haven, Cynthia L. "'At the Mercy of My Passions and Opinions': A Conversation with William Kennedy." Los Angeles Review of Books, 8 June 2020, lareviewofbooks.org/article/at-the-mercy-of-my-passions-and-opinions-a-conversation-with-william-kennedy. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Kennedy, Liam. “Memory and Hearsay: Ethnic History and Identity in Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game and Ironweed.” MELUS, vol. 18, Spring 1993, pp. 71–83.

Kennedy, William. Conversations with William Kennedy. Edited by Neila C. Seshachari. University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

Kennedy, William. “The Art of Fiction CXI: William Kennedy.” Interview by Douglas R. Allen and Mona Simpson. The Paris Review, vol. 31, Winter 1989, pp. 34–59.

Michener, Christian. From Then into Now: William Kennedy’s Albany Novels. University of Scranton Press, 1998.

Turner, Tramble T. “Quinn’s Book: Reconstructing Irish-American History.” MELUS, vol. 18, Spring 1993, pp. 31–46.

Van Dover, J. K. Understanding William Kennedy. University of South Carolina Press, 1991.