Fascination with Corning Leads to Prize-Winning Biography

Paul Grondahl, D.A. ’84, was named Albany Author of the Year by the Friends of the Albany Public Library, for his book Mayor Corning: Albany Icon, Albany Enigma.

Published by Washington Park Press this month, the work is the 538-page biography of the man who served the longest-running term (42 years) of any city mayor in the nation’s history. Grondahl became interested in Corning as a subject when he interviewed Corning’s dying widow, Betty, in 1992 for an article in the Albany Times Union, the newspaper for which Grondahl has been a feature writer since 1984.

“I had a sense that a whole chapter in Albany history was passing,” he said. He proceeded to conduct more than 200 interviews for the book. That and the writing was conducted while he kept his full-time job as reporter, for which he has won several New York State Associated Press awards.

Grondahl came to Albany in 1981 — two years before Corning’s death — as a graduate student in English literature. In the acknowledgments in his book on Corning, he notes three Department of English faculty members: Gene Garber, William Dumbleton — who edited the Corning book — and William Kennedy, who served as an unofficial mentor to Grondahl, and whose own work on Albany, including his Albany series of novels and the nonfiction work O'Albany, proved an inspiration.