William Joseph Kennedy (born Albany, 1928) is an American novelist and journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. He writes in English, and he is one of the writers who have most thoroughly portrayed Albany, New York, the city that serves as the setting for much of his fiction.
The son of working-class Irish-American parents, he studied at Siena College and began as a sports reporter for a local paper. After army service in Europe, he worked in Puerto Rico, where he became managing editor of The San Juan Star and befriended the journalist Hunter S. Thompson. He returned to Albany in 1963 and spent years investigating local politics for the Times Union, experience that fed into his early fiction.
His first novel, The Ink Truck, appeared in 1969, but wider recognition came with Ironweed (1983), which several publishers had rejected before Viking Press took it on. His prose blends realism, humor and touches of the fantastic, and his characters are often working-class people shaped by politics, drink and guilt. His legacy rests largely on his fiction about Albany, which many critics compare to James Joyce's portrait of Dublin.
Key works
- The Ink Truck (1969): his first novel, about a columnist who leads a strike at his Albany newspaper.
- Legs (1975): a novel about the gangster Jack 'Legs' Diamond, killed in Albany in 1931.
- Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978): a portrait of a fictional Albany hustler.
- Ironweed (1983): a novel about a former baseball player turned vagrant in Albany, which won the Pulitzer.
- Quinn's Book (1988): a novel that extends the Albany family saga.
Curiosities
A prize after many rejections
Ironweed was turned down by thirteen publishers before the writer Saul Bellow urged Viking Press to reconsider. The novel went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.
A genius grant
In 1983 he was named a MacArthur Fellow, a award more commonly known as a 'genius grant'.
Teachers and influences
Influenced by
- William Shakespeare 1564–1616
- Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849
- Gore Vidal 1925–2012
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.