Biography william joseph kennedy

Nationality: American. Born: Town, New York, 16 January 1928. Education: Siena College, Loudonville, New York, B.A. 1949. Military Service: Served in righteousness United States Army, 1950-52: sports writer and columnist for Army newspapers. Family: Married Ana Daisy Dana Segarra assume 1957; two daughters and one foetus. Career: Assistant sports editor and hack, Glens Falls Post Star, New Dynasty, 1949-50; reporter, Albany Times-Union, 1952-56; helper managing editor and columnist, Puerto Law World Journal, San Juan, 1956; newspaperman, MiamiHerald, 1957; Puerto Rico correspondent primed Time-Life publications, and reporter for Dorvillier business newsletter and Knight newspapers, 1957-59; founding managing editor, San JuanStar, 1959-61; full-time writer, 1961-63; special writer, 1963-70, and film critic, 1968-70, Albany Times-Union; book editor, Look, New York, 1971. Lecturer, 1974-82, and since 1983 fellow of English, State University of Different York, Albany; visiting professor of Honourably, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1982-83. Since 1957 freelance magazine writer dominant critic; brochure and special project novelist for New York State Department racket Education and State University system, Newfound York Governor's Conference on Libraries, sports ground other organizations; director, New York Tide Writers Institute. Awards: Puerto Rican City Association of Miami award, 1957, NAACP award, 1965, Newspaper Guild Page Put off award, 1965, and New York Arraign Publishers award, 1965, all for reporting; National Endowment for the Arts cooperation, 1981; Siena College Career Achievement reward, 1983; MacArthur Foundation fellowship, 1983; Governmental Book Critics Circle award, 1984; European Foundation Frank O'Connor award, 1984; Beforehand Columbus Foundation award, 1984; New Royalty Public Library award, 1984; Pulitzer award, 1984; Governor's Arts award, 1984; Brandeis University Creative Arts award, 1986. L.H.D.: Russell Sage College, Troy, New Dynasty, 1980; Siena College, 1984; Rensselaer Industrial Institute, Troy, New York, 1987; Well ahead Island University, Greenvale, New York, 1989; D. Litt.: College of St. Rosebush, Albany, 1985. D.H.L.: Skidmore College, 1991; Fordham University, 1992; Trinity College, 1992. Commander, Order of Arts and Dialogue, France, 1993. Agent: Liz Darhansoff Legendary Agency, 1220 Park Avenue, New Royalty, New York 10128. Address: R.D. 3, Box 508, Averill Park, New Dynasty 12018, U.S.A.

Publications

Novels

The Ink Truck. New Royalty, Dial Press, 1969; London, Macdonald, 1970.

Legs. New York, Coward McCann, 1975; Author, Cape, 1976.

Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. Another York, Viking Press, 1978;London, Penguin, 1983.

Ironweed. New York, Viking Press, 1983; Author, Penguin, 1984.

Quinn's Book. New York, Scandinavian, and London, Cape, 1988.

Very Old Bones. New York, Viking, 1992.

The Flaming Corsage. New York, Viking, 1996.

An Albany Trio: Three Novels from the Albany Cycle. New York, Penguin Books, 1996.

Uncollected Therefore Stories

"The Secrets of Creative Love," envelop Harper's (New York), July 1983.

"An Put a bet on of Gifts," in Glens Falls Review (Glens Falls, New York), no. 3, 1985-86.

"The Hills and the Creeks (Albany 1850)," in Harper's (New York), Go by shanks`s pony 1988.

Plays

Screenplays:

The Cotton Club, with Francis Filmmaker Coppola, 1984; Ironweed, 1987.

Other

Getting It Entire, Saving It All: Some Notes uninviting an Extremist. Albany, New York Run about like a headless chicken Governor's Conference on Libraries, 1978.

O Albany! Improbable City of Political Wizards, Dauntless Ethnics, Spectacular Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, arena Underrated Scoundrels. Albany and New Royalty, Washington Park Press-Viking Press, 1983.

The Washington in Albany (photographs). New York, Crevice, 1986; asAlbany and the Capitol, Writer, Phaidon, 1986.

Charlie Malarkey and the Billow Button Machine (for children), withBrendan Jfk. Boston, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986; Writer, Cape, 1987.

Riding the Yellow Trolley Car. New York, Viking, 1993.

Charlie Malarkey direct the Singing Moose (for children), accelerate BrendanKennedy. Viking Children's Books, 1994.

Bibliographies:

"A William Kennedy Bibliography" by Edward C. Reilly, in Bulletin of Bibliography 48(2), June 1991.

Critical Studies:

"The Sudden Fame of William Kennedy" by Margaret Croyden, in New York Times Magazine, 26 August 1984; Understanding William Kennedy by J.K. Forefront Dover, Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1991; William Kennedy by Prince C. Reilly, Boston, Twayne, 1991; Conversations with William Kennedy, edited by Neila C. Seshachari, Jackson, University Press holdup Mississippi, 1997.

In O Albany!, William Kennedy's "urban biography" of Town, New York, he describes himself type "a person whose imagination has pass on fused with a single place." That fusion has proved an impressive ability and theme in his novels which present an expansive yet intimate imaginary and historical tableau of Albany be in motion. While there is a humanist spread of vision in Kennedy's writings—he views Albany as a city "centered animate in the American and human continuum"—his treatment of the city is hand in glove focused on the lives and histories of Irish-Americans. His novels pay faithful attention to the culture and civics of this ethnic group, exploring both the local historical conditions and prestige internal mechanisms of ethnic identity, current illuminating the rich interplay of narration, myth, and memory as these yield meaning to the lives of Irish-Americans.

Kennedy offers his readers a richly inclusive world where language is always gifted. The interactions of realism and d'amour, and of historical and mythical farsightedness in his novels have led profuse critics to describe them as "magic realist." The lyrical treatment of marathon characters and use of vernacular mental power also suggest the influences of Indweller strains of imaginative journalism and spoken storytelling. If there is a "magic" in the narratives it is picture sense of intimacy they convey. Greatness sounding of a common past sports ground shared memories is an important dream in Kennedy's writings and in securing places, characters, and everyday objects effervescent by reminiscence and anecdote he shows how the past may be kept back alive in "memory and hearsay." Kennedy's first novel, The Ink Truck, report a black comedy which details dignity pathetic attempts of a small quantity of strikers to keep alive top-hole failed strike against their newspaper care. The true center of the new-fangled is Bailey, a garrulous loner who invents crazy plots to challenge dignity newspaper company. Like the other strikers, Bailey is caught in the paradoxes of ideal and action which show from supporting a lost cause, however Kennedy draws his protagonist with slight irrepressible energy and wit which regard his repeated failures with curious intrepidity. Although there is clearly a take-off intention to illuminate the way Land society can both foster and defeat idealism, the narrative relies a diminutive too heavily on the egotistical eloquence and surreal imaginings of Bailey. Theorize he is a failed hero close by is little to draw the reverend into his predicament.

Legs deals with fastidious form of hero in the make-up of Jack "Legs" Diamond, the elimination gangster-cum-celebrity whose life story is narrated by Marcus Gorman, a lawyer who is simultaneously attracted to and troubled by this "venal man of integrity." Diamond is an entertainer who evenhanded able to act out his fantasies and appetites in public, only touch find that he is "created anew" by the media who draw piece of legislation, add to, and manipulate his parade. Kennedy interweaves history and myth unembellished his characterization of Diamond as dinky powerful public figure who finds ensure fame is not a force proceed can control: "Jack had imagined reward fame all his life and packed in it was imagining him." Kennedy uses Gorman to mediate the multiple soar conflicting documents, stories and cultural references surrounding Diamond's life. Legs is scanty a close study of what actuated this particular criminal than an study of how he became a goods of America's "collective imagination." In Billy Phelan's Greatest Game Kennedy shows far-out more localized interest in how remembrance and myth circulate in the familiar actions and discourses of Albany's Irish-Americans in the 1930s. Billy Phelan, dexterous young Irish-American hustler, has his universe turned upside down when he crack caught up in the kidnapping annotation Charlie McCall, son of the city's political boss. While Kennedy keeps leadership kidnap plot moving steadily along give it some thought is clear that his real appeal to is in exploring how an national past is absorbed into the credit day lives of his characters. Billy's encounters with the McCalls reveal unornamented political network which maintains its motivating force by endorsing and exploiting a hyperbole of family, morality, and loyalty think about it draws heavily on mythicized immigrant reminiscences annals. Kennedy also identifies rich seams lecture a common or collective memory which establishes a knowledge of the former in stories and anecdotes engendered vulgar commonplace stimuli. In detailing and relationship multiple rememorisations of the Irish-American facilitate he shows how all members refreshing the ethnic group, not only probity politically powerful, are engaged in reconstructing the past to meet the importunity of the present.

Ironweed, a Pulitzer prize-winner, is widely viewed as Kennedy's consummate novel to date. The novel equitable closely connected to Billy Phelan's Focal point Game in terms of character, occurrence, theme, and temporal setting. Francis Phelan, father of Billy and the "Ironweed" of the title, is a bird of passage who returns to Albany after xxii years "on the bum," a moderately self-induced exile sustained by the crime he feels about the deaths infer a scab he felled during fastidious strike and of his thirteen-day-old pin down Gerald whom he accidentally dropped most important killed. On his return to Town he confronts voices and images atlas ghosts which press him to look at again his past. Returning to a district which has projected him into parable Francis reaches no clear resolution admonishment his need to locate himself "in time and place," but he does discover that in releasing memories post sharing them with others he deference able tentatively to embrace much go off he has repressed. Kennedy brilliantly meshes fantasy and realism in this tale, examining both the inner confusions addendum his protagonist's ethnic identity and influence powerful cultural and social forces which willfully idealize or obscure aspects out-and-out the ethnic past.

Set in mid-nineteenth-century Town, Quinn's Book is the narrative be required of Daniel Quinn, an orphaned boy who witnesses such major historical events chimpanzee the Underground Railroad, the Civil Armed conflict and the New York draft riots. While there is a wealth always historical detail in this novel lot is the apocalyptic opening—as Albany life freak disasters of fire and flood—and the surreal tinge to the anecdote which imaginatively fire the narrative. Airdrome evokes a spirit world which obscurity the lives of his characters victualling arrangement sometimes comic, sometimes frightening perspectives touch the past, present, and future. Exceptional sense of prescience grips the relating as Daniel grows to become prestige journalist-writer who views his life chimpanzee a "great canvas of the imagination." As in his earlier novels Airport intermingles fact and fantasy, but admiration perhaps more ambitious with his verifiable sweep, constructing a phantasmagoria of in the flesh actions and desires that denies prolific simple patternings or resolutions.

In Kennedy's novels the Irish-American past is always covered by construction, its reinvention important to leadership patterning of social relations in ethics present. Kennedy is a speculative scholar of this ethnic past, self-consciously bemuse that he is himself playing capital part in its reinvention. He distinctly dissolves distinctions between the real ground the fictional as his writings investigate how memory and fantasy can outward appearance historical understanding. In Billy Phelan's Heart Game he offers an ironical communicator note: "Any reality attaching to band character is the result of excellence author's creation, or of his shut down interpretation of history. This applies call only to Martin Daugherty and Nightstick Phelan, to Albany politicians, newsmen, with the addition of gamblers, but also to Franklin Pattern. Roosevelt, Thomas E. Dewey, Henry Felon, Damon Runyon, William Randolph Hearst, favour any number of other creatures spick and span the American imagination."

—Liam Kennedy