Director of the New York State Writers Institute

Articles and Events

Douglass Brinkley discusses the journalism of William Kennedy at the NYS Writers Institute in 1999 (38:36)

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A Literary Friendship Spanning 5 Decades
Bill Kennedy's long friendship with E. L. Doctorow (who visited 2/27) is the subject of an article by Paul Grondahl in the  Times Union:

Always an ink-stained wretch
William Kennedy in his life as a journalist

 

"A book cannot save a city, but it can prove that a city is worth saving." — Stefan Beck

William Kennedy has written eight novels in what he calls the “Albany Cycle,” all set in his native city, Albany, N.Y. 

Writing in the New York Review of Books, the novelist and scholar
Thomas Flanagan took this overview of these books:

William Kennedy’s cycle … began with Legs in 1975.  This was followed by Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game in 1978 and Ironweed in 1983. They were spoken of then as a trilogy, partly because they shared a setting and some characters and partly because the third of them, a harrowing narrative of pain and a possible redemption, seemed to bring certain shared themes to resolution.

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