William Kennedy in an undated photo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

“What James Joyce did for Dublin and Saul Bellow did for Chicago, William [Kennedy] has done for Albany,” wrote the writer (and Bellow biographer) James Atlas in Vogue in 1992. High praise for a writer whose novels about his hometown were relatively unknown until less than a decade before. But Atlas’s tribute was topped by another writer, longtime America contributor Peter Quinn, who had even more fulsome praise for the Albany native in a 1984 review: 

“In Kennedy, Albany has found its Homer.”

Well, it is near Troy. But anyone who was surprised at such praise just a few months after Kennedy’s breakthrough novel, 1983’s Ironweed, is probably no longer surprised by the plaudits Kennedy (now 97) receives as a chronicler not just of the hardscrabble haunts of his native city but of the human experience in all its dimensions. “Stepping into a Kennedy novel is like stepping into all available art forms,” wrote the writer Colum McCann in a 2018 essay. “He’s a historian, a journalist, a critic, an essayist, a poet, a philosopher, a playwright. He consistently seeks the edge of his art. He is one of the great verbal cinematographers of our times. He captures light, transforms it, guides it forward, shifts it around, and burns it down onto the page.” 

And while Kennedy will always be associated with Albany, McCann wrote, “he, like all serious writers, is really examining the territory of the mind and the heart, what happens to them when they are hung out there in the harshest human weather.”

William Kennedy was born into an Irish Catholic family in 1928 in Albany, N.Y., and attended Christian Brothers Academy and Siena College, from which he graduated in 1949. He worked for a year as a sports reporter at the Post-Star in Glens Falls, N.Y., an hour north of Albany, before being drafted in 1950 and serving as a reporter for Army newspapers in the United States and Germany for two years. He then worked for the Albany Times Union for three years before moving to Puerto Rico, working as a correspondent for Time-Life, the Miami Herald and the San Juan Star (and meeting the aforementioned Bellow and becoming pals with Hunter S. Thompson).

In San Juan, Kennedy also met Dana Daisy Segarra, a Puerto Rican native and a Broadway dancer; their wedding was a month later and they were married for 67 years. His writing career began in earnest in Puerto Rico, a career Kennedy described in staccato prose in the New York Times in 1990:

Five years after leaving the Army I would get married, write my first and last play and my 25th short story, then quit journalism to write a novel. I would write the novel and it would be awful. Seven years after the Army I would become managing editor of a daily newspaper. After nine years I would quit journalism again to finish another novel. I would be showing improvement in novel writing, but not much. After 15 years of work as a half-time journalist, half-time fiction writer, I would become a movie critic. After 17 years I would publish my first novel. After 19 years I would become a book critic. After 22 years I would become a teacher. And then, after 31 years, I would write my first movie script, may God have mercy on his soul.

Kennedy returned home in 1963 to work again for the Times Union, a job that exposed him to many of the political intrigues of New York’s state capital that would appear in his fiction. He was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for an investigative series on Albany’s slums. 

He published his first novel, The Ink Truck, in 1969. A second, Legs (about the gangster Legs Diamond), appeared in 1975, and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game came in 1978. They received critical acclaim but not much of an audience. Kennedy also taught journalism and creative writing from 1974 to 1982 at the University of Albany, which made him a full professor in 1983. 

That year began with the publication of a novel that had been rejected more than a dozen times by publishers and was initially dismissed by Kennedy’s own former editor as “a book about bums”: Ironweed. It finally saw the light of day through the help of Bellow, who once said that “it didn’t take long for an old dog like me to know Kennedy was the real thing.” The book’s publication in January of 1983 also ushered in perhaps the greatest year a writer ever had. 

Ironweed was a critical and commercial hit. All three of Kennedy’s previous novels were reissued, and he sold the movie rights to two. The MacArthur Foundation gave him a “genius grant.” He published a collection of essays on his hometown, O Albany! Francis Ford Coppola hired him to write a movie about the Cotton Club. A publisher snapped up the rights to his next novel on the basis of a handful of chapters. And early in 1984, Kennedy found out that Ironweed had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Albany held a festival in his honor, complete with tours of his favorite haunts. 

Ironweed is now considered the third book in Kennedy’s “Albany Cycle,” including Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Quinn’s Book (1988), Very Old Bones (1992), The Flaming Corsage (1996), Roscoe (2002) and Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (2012). The “Albany Cycle” tells the stories of several multigenerational Albany families who are enmeshed in the city’s ethnic enclaves, churches, political intrigues and more. His fictional heroes and antiheroes are part Edwin O’Connor, part Alice McDermott, but all Albany, even as some of his plots have sprawled far beyond the city in terms of theme and locale. They are not all uplifting tales, but they are the stories of canny and wily survivors: Ironweed takes its name from the plant, whose tough stem and ability to grow in degraded soil serve as metaphors for the novel’s main character, Francis Phelan, who is knocked down but never out throughout a boozy, tragedy-ridden life.

In a glowing 1984 profile of Kennedy in the New York Times Magazine (“at home with drinkers and losers as well as with writers and professors”), he described himself as “very much a person who perceives the possibility of tragedy, despair, and darkness around the corner.” His new editor was more blunt: “If you grow up Irish, you have a gloomy view of the possibilities of people. His Irishness is a real key to who he is and what he is thinking. I recognized the Irish link immediately. I’m certain he was an altar boy.”

Some of Kennedy’s other works include plays, screenplays, biographies and books of essays, including Riding the Yellow Trolley Car in 1993. Many of his books were reviewed in America, and Kennedy was a favorite of former editor in chief and literary editor George W. Hunt, S.J.

Readers of America may recall Liam Callanan’s 2017 essay for the magazine upon winning the George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize, in which Callanan recounted his experience as a student at Loyola High School in Los Angeles (also my alma mater!) of writing a letter to Kennedy—and receiving a reply.

 In a 1993 review for America of Riding the Yellow Trolley Car, James E. Rocks quoted the author on writing, which Kennedy called “a kind of religious experience, not because of its holiness, for as a profession it is more profane than sacred, but because of its enmeshment with the Catholic Church’s supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity—as I had learned them.”

In his 1984 review in America of O Albany!, Peter Quinn also quoted Kennedy on matters literary:

It is the task of this and other books I have written, and hope to write, to peer into the heart of this always-shifting past, to be there when it ceases to be what it was, when it becomes what it must become under scrutiny, when it turns so magically, so inevitably, from then into now.

Kennedy will turn 98 in January. But gray hair and length of years did not prevent him from stopping by an Albany bar three weeks ago to participate in a marathon reading of his 1975 novel Legs. The evening was a fundraiser for the food pantry at Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish in North Albany. Some 90 years ago, William Kennedy was an altar boy there.

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Our poetry selection for this week is “The Pardon,” by S. D. Carpenter. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

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Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.