IRONWEED. Pub Group West Audio, 1988. [read by Jason Robards]
In 1993, Kennedy was picked to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In addition he has received numerous literary awards, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Regents Medal of Excellence from the State University of New York, and a Governor's Arts Award. He was also labeled a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the board of directors of the New York State Council for the Humanities. He is also the 2001-2002 Kritikos Professor at the University of Oregon. He was elected to the Academy of Arts and Sciences in May 2002.
Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978) introduces the Phelan home, subsequent generations of which appear in five more novels. Billy is a s
mall-time Depression-era gambler and bookie who becomes mixed up in the kidnapping of a Albany politician's son. Doris Grumbach said in the Saturday Review, "No one writing in America today has Kennedy's rich and pregnant gift of gab; his pure verbal energy; his love of people."
In San Juan, Kennedy took a lesson with author Saul Bellow, who said of Kennedy's early go, "He could take stuff from skid row and jot approximately these folk for [if they were as] entirely human as anyone else. The people he wrote about didn't understand they had convert pariahs. He wrote about them from the inside. . . I was moved by the personas, by their childish but human frailties."
Kennedy likewise continued to distend his open-ended "Albany Cycle." While the first three novels in that cycle unfold in a Depression-era setting, the next three browse various periods in the city's history. Quinn's Book (1988) is set in the 19th centenary and follows the picaresque adventures of a Phelan ancestor, Daniel Quinn. The Boston Sunday Globe called it a "book of prodigies and sweetness, magic and horrors, it immerses itself in the supernatural. . .Touching and vivid and comic."
Legs (1975), the first novel of Kennedy's "Albany Cycle," tells the anecdote of Albany bandit Jack "Legs" Diamond. Newsweek called it "A particularly seductive portrait. . . a quite able story, full of bounce and intellect." Dean Flower said in the Hudson Review, "the speakeasies and gangsters and quickly talk seem momentary and legendary, with Irish-Catholic Albany as a microcosm of the thirties."
Kennedy's literary successes opened the gate to the world of movie-making. A long-time theater enthusiast and video critic, he began to write screenplays when he co-scripted The Cotton Club (1986) with Francis Ford Coppola. He also wrote the membrane version of Ironweed (1987), directed
by Hector Babenco and starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.
Fhardly everme 40 years, William Kennedy has crafted history and memory into a body of literature that is as remarkable for its kind as it is for erecting an Albany of the imagination. "What James Joyce did for Dublin and Saul Bellow did for Chicago, William has done for Albany, New York. . . .
His cycle of Albany novels namely an of the great resurrections of place in our literature," affirmed James Atlas in Vogue. In Kennedy's extremely regarded "Albany Cycle," outcasts and machine politicians, lowlifes and swells populate an imagined Albany as real as whichever city of bricks. Thanks to Kennedy, Albany occupies a confidential location on America's mythic map as a chief of the citizen memories, and a city of daily struggles.
RECORDINGS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reilly, Edward C. "A William Kennedy Bibliography." BULLETIN OF BIBLIOGRAPHY, 48 June 1991: 61-74.
A second nonfiction book, Riding the Yellow Trolley Car, emerged in 1993. Library Journal called this accumulation of essays, memoirs, reviews, and reportage "a great happiness to read, not stuff what the subject. Another winner from Kennedy: highly recommended." Kennedy's other works embody two children's books co-authored with his son Brendan, Charlie Malarkey and the Belly Button Machine (1986), and Charlie Malarkey and the Singing Moose (1993). Kennedy's 1st full-length play, Grand View (1996) the article of apolitical campaign among the state governor and Albany's political foreman, was staged in the spring of 1996 at Capital Repertory Theater in Albany. Roscoe, the next installment in the "Albany Cycle," came out in January 2002.
Kennedy educated creative writing and journalism as an professor from 1974 to 1982 at the University at Albany, where he is now a instructor in the English Department. He instructed writing at Cornell University in 1982-83. In 1983, Kennedy was awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Part of that reward went to the creation of Kennedys alternative, the University at Albany, State University of New York, using fifteen thousand dollars for 5 years (every), to create a writers institute at Albany. The University made a commitment to mate those asset, thus assisting the Writers Institute at Albany become a reality. The emulating year, Governor Mario M. Cuomo signed into law the legislation creating the New York State Writers Institute, giving it goals and responsibilities to behave a spacious scope of cultural and educational scholastic activities.
Kennedy had expected to ascertain inspiration for his fiction in Puerto Rico, but discovered that Albany held a stronger demand on his imagination. He returned to Albany in 1963 and wrote a series of articles about the city that acquired him a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize and invested the root for a nonfiction book, O Albany! (1983). Matthew Parrish, writing in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, called O Albany! "a book distinguished by intellectual depth and a vibrant prose neatness. . . a rich feast that bubbles with the humor, majesty and pathos of the males and women who lived, worked and played in New York's capital city from the 17th Century to the present."
Selected Bibliography FICTION The Ink Truck. New York: Viking Press, 1984. Legs. New York: Penguin Books, 1983. Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. New York: Viking Press, 1978. Ironweed. New York: Viking Press, 1983. Quinn's Book. New York: Viking Press, 1988. Very Old Bones. New York: Viking Press, 1992. The Flaming Corsage. New York: Viking Press, 1996. Roscoe. New York: Viking Press, 2002. NONFICTION O Albany!: Improbable City of Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated Scoundrels. New York: Viking Press, 1983. The Making of Ironweed, New York: Viking Penguin, 1988. Riding the Yellow Trolley Car, New York: Viking Press, 1993. SCREENPLAYS The Cotton Club. Co-authored with Francis Ford Coppola. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986. Ironweed. Tri-Star, 1987. PLAYS Grand View. Premiered at Capital Repertory Theatre, Albany, NY, 1996.
In the System. HumaniTech* Short Play Project Premiere, UAlbany, March 2003.
CHILDREN'S BOOKS Charlie Malarkey and the Belly Button Machine (co-authored with Brendan Kennedy). New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.
Charlie Malarkey and the Singing Moose (co-authored with Brendan Kennedy). New York: Viking Children's Books, 1994.
SELECTED RESOURCES
Criticism
Flanagan, Thomas. O ALBANY!. New York Review of Books. April 25, 2002
Giamo, Benedict F. THE HOMELESS OF IRONWEED: BLOSSOMS ON THE CRAG. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997.
Gillespie, Michael Patrick, READING WILLIAM KENNEDY. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press (in reception).
Lynch, Vivian Valvano, PORTRAITS OF ARTISTS: WARRIORS IN THE NOVELS OF WILLIAM KENNEDY. Bethesda: International Scholars Publications, 1999.
Mallon, Thomas. WILLIAM KENNEDY'S GREATEST GAME. The Atlantic Monthly. February 2002.
Seshachari, Neila C., COURTESANS, STARS, WIVES & VIXENS: THE MANY FACES OF FEMALE POWER IN KENNEDY'S NOVELS, AWP Conference, Albany, NY. April 17, 1999.
Marowski, Daniel G. and Matur, Roger, editors. "William Kennedy." CONTEMPORARY LITERARY CRITICISM, Vol. 53, Detroit: Gale Research, 1989, pp. 189-201.
Michener, Christian. FROM THEN INTO NOW: WILLIAM KENNEDY'S ALBANY NOVELS. University of Scranton Press, 1998.
Reilly, Edward C. TWAYNE'S UNITED STATES AUTHORS SERIES: WILLIAM KENNEDY. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991.
Van Dover, J. K. UNDERSTANDING WILLIAM KENNEDY. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991.
INTERVIEWS AND PROFILES
Baruth, Philip. "William Kennedy on the Surreal and the Unconscious, the Religious, the Subline, and the Gonzo." NEW ENGLAND REVIEW, V 19 No 1 Winter 1998: 116-26.
Bauer, Douglas. "Talking With William Kennedy." THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD, 13, 3 January 16, 1993: 6.
Busby, Mark. "William Kennedy." In DICTIONARY OF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY: YEARBOOK, 1985. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1985: 387-94.
Croyden, Margaret. "The Sudden Fame of William Kennedy." THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, August 26, 1984: 33+.
Heron, Kim. "The Responsibility of Carrying the Dead." THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, May 22, 1988, Sec. 7:4.
Sheppard, R. Z. "Stealing From Himself." TIME, V. 147, May 13, 1996: 92.
Stokvis, Irene. "First Novelists: Twenty-Five New Writers--Fall 1969--Discuss Their First Published Novels." LIBRARY JOURNAL 94, October 1, 1969; 3475.
Seshachari, Neila C, ed., CONVERSATIONS WITH WILLIAM KENNEDY. Jackson, MS & London: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.
The Flaming Corsage (1996) portrays the violent courtship and wedding of Katrina Taylor and Edward Daugherty during the decades that precede and follow the rotate of the century. Critic Harold Bloom said "The Flaming Corsage transforms the ['Albany Cycle'] into what Ruskin complimented as 'Stage Fire' in Dickens. At once prose-poem, historical novel and theatrical melodrama, Kennedy's current book demonstrates an exuberance beyond his before work."
THE FLAMING CORSAGE. Newport Beach, CA: Books on Tape, 1996.
VERY OLD BONES. Newport Beach, CA: Books ashore Tape, 1996.
"William Kennedy, Interview." American Audio Prose Library, June 1987.
"William Kennedy's Albany." Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities & Sciences,
max 90, 1996. (Videocassette, 58 minutes.)
"William Kennedy" [movie recording]. Directed by Fenella Greenfield; Northbrook,
Kevin Durant Shoes, IL: The Roland Collection of Films on Art,
lebron james, 1989.
Very Old Bones (1992) takes the "Albany Cycle" ahead to the 1950s, and examines the mental collapse and redemption of Orson Purcell, the bastard son of talent Peter Phelan. The New York Times asserted, "Few Irish-American writers have produced extra haunting portraits of their progenitors or the ghosts that possessed them than Mr. Kennedy has in Very Olds Bones."
Born in 1928 in Albany's North End, Kennedy attended Public School 20, the Christian Brother's Academy, and Siena College prior to pursuing a career in journalism. He connected the Post Star, in Glens Falls as a sports reporter and, behind creature charted in 1950, worked for an legion news in Europe. Upon his dismiss he joined the Albany Times-Union. In 1956 he adopted a job with a newspaper in Puerto Rico, where he met and would presently wed Daisy (Dana) Sosa, an actress and dancer. (The Kennedy's have three children--Dana, Katherine and Brendan.) Kennedy became administrate editor of the fledgling San Juan Star in 1959, only apt leave 2 years afterward apt pursue book fiction full-time.
CONTACT INFORMATION: Science Library, SL 320 | University at Albany, NY 12222 | Phone 518-442-5620 | Fax 518-442-5621 | email writers@uamail.albany.edu
Billy's dad, Francis, a outcast on the escape from his own demons and past faults, is the principal character of Ironweed (1983), a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Robert Towers phoned Ironweed "a kind of fantasia on the strangeness of human fate, on the mysterious ways in which a life can be altered and sometimes redeemed. . . a work of unusual interest, incipient in its conception, full of energy and color, a marvelous counting to the Albany cycle."
Kennedy's Albany journalism provided him with an chance to internalize the city thoroughly and use it as a fictional scenery. His first novel, The Ink Truck (1969), relates the story of a newspaper strike in a vividly evoked but unnamed Albany. People journal called it "Wildly funny, rich and full of lyrical moments." Time called it "Lean, vigorous and grounded in elaborate and humanities. . .a bawdy Celtic romp."
mall| 1996.
few yards departed
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