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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.
Praise for Very Old Bones “An immensely gratifying novel...With its dialogue as chillingly perceptive as its family insights, this novel has about it a crisp, authoritative ease-as though the truth were just hiding there on the outskirts of Albany, waiting to be brought home, and Kennedy obliged.”—The Boston Globe “Kennedy's justly acclaimed Albany Cycle [is] one of the imperishable products of American literature since the Second World War. These books can be read singly or in sequence, but read they must be. Kennedy is one of our necessary writers.”—GQ “Kennedy succeeds admirably in shuttling his narrative voice between present and past and weaving a cloth in which history and myth are indistinguishable....Few Irish-American writers have produced more haunting portraits of their ancestors or the ghosts that possessed them than Kennedy has in Very Old Bones.”—The New York Times “Kennedy's novels have the rough feel of stories told, not of chapters written and artfully polished. His beguiling yarns are the kind of family myths embellished and retold across a kitchen table late at night, whiskified, raunchy, darkly funny, tangles of old resentments and fresh exasperations.”—TIME “Very Old Bones deals with the artistic process, with the difficulties of romantic love, with the astonishing twists and turns that an individual life can take, but its most important truths concern the ways that our individual destinies are linked to our ancestral past.”—USA Today “This is a novel of brilliant speeches and innovative, ambitious plotting....Above all, this is the sound and sense of a fiction writer very much working with a poet's ear and heart. Kennedy's prose is swift and glib, intent upon creating sparks and surprises, and fully open to life's magical touches, its haunts and ghostly discoveries.”—Chicago Sun-Times “With remarkable tenderness, yet without a hint of sentimentality, both [Very Old Bones and Ironweed] delineate family and community ties, portray the spiritually needy, and evoke the grimmest and grubbiest of lives while convincingly suggesting the possibility of redemption.”—The Washington Post
