William Kennedy (author)
| William Kennedy | |
|---|---|
| Born | William Joseph Kennedy January 16, 1928 Albany, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Author, journalist, historian |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Siena College |
| Period | 1955 – present |
| Genre | Fiction, History, Supernatural |
| Notable works | Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed |
| Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1984), Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award (2001) |
| Spouse | Ana Segarra (m. 1957) |
| Children | 3 |
William Joseph Kennedy (born January 16, 1928) is an American writer and journalist born and raised in Albany, New York, the son of William J. Kennedy and to Mary E. McDonald. Kennedy was raised a Catholic. Many of his novels feature the interactions of members of the fictional Irish-American Phelan family and make use of incidents of Albany's history and the supernatural. Kennedy's works include The Ink Truck (1969), Legs (1975), Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978), Ironweed (1983, winner of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; movie, 1987), and Roscoe (2002). In 2011, he published Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, which one reviewer called a book "written with such brio and encompassing humanity that it may well deserve to be called the best of the bunch".
Kennedy is a graduate of Siena College in Loudonville, New York, and currently resides in Averill Park, a hamlet about 16 miles east of Albany. After serving in the US Army, Kennedy lived in Puerto Rico, where he met his mentor, Saul Bellow, who encouraged him to write novels. While living in San Juan, he befriended the journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, a friendship that continued throughout their careers. Kennedy, who had been eager to leave Albany, returned to his hometown and worked for the Albany newspaper the Times Union as an investigative journalist, writing stories exposing activities of Daniel P. O'Connell and his political cronies of the dominant Democratic Party. His use of Albany as the setting for eight of his novels was described during 2011 by book critic Jonathan Yardley as painting "a portrait of a single city perhaps unique in American fiction".
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