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William Kennedy, author, screenwriter and playwright, was born and raised in Albany, New York. Kennedy brought his native city to literary life in many of his works. The Albany cycle, includes Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and the Pulitzer Prize winning Ironweed.The versatile Kennedy wrote the screenplay for Ironweed, the play Grand View, and cowrote the screenplay for the The Cotton Club with Francis Ford Coppola. Kennedy also wrote the nonfiction O Albany! and Riding the Yellow Trolley Car. Some of the other works he is known for include Roscoe and Very Old Bones. Kennedy is the founding director of the New York State Writers Institute and, in 1993, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has received numerous literary awards, including the Literary Lions Award from the New York Public Library, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Governor's Arts Award. Kennedy was also named Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France and a member of the board of directors of the New York State Council for the Humanities.
The ambience is 1938 Albany, New York, among an action-easy, gravy-vested sporting mob of small fish - bookies, bootleggers, pimps, bartenders. And larger fish too: the McCalls, the prelates of Albany's Democratic machine under whose sanction and careful eye the anchovies swim. When son Charlie McCall is kidnapped, two go-betweens are sent crab-wise and with utmost street-smarts to find out what they can: Martin Daugherty, a local newspaper columnist, the son of a famous local writer; and Billy Phelan, bookie, bowling hustler, and no less strictly observant of a code of honor than an Arthurian knight. Through Daugherty's eyes, we watch Billy lose in this game he can't win - either he informs on his pals or else he's cut out of the action forever by the McCalls. Kennedy (The Ink Truck, Legs) gets the feel and the sounds down perfectly ( Who died and left you so smart? ) - his Irishmen are fully as good as George Higgins' or John Gregory Dunne's. But the steeping affection and knowledge he has for the scene wets the book down too much; we know too early who will do what, and Kennedy often seems more interested with gilt-blarney ( When time descends, ego forfends ) and a too forcibly imposed father/son dialectic. But within its indulged perimeters, Kennedy's version of Depression Albany is made as real as your hand. (Kirkus Reviews)
