William Kennedy

American · born 1928

William Joseph Kennedy was born on January 16, 1928, in Albany, New York, to a working-class Irish Catholic family, and grew up in the North Albany neighborhood that would become the fixed setting of nearly everything he wrote. He attended Public School 20 and Christian Brothers Academy before graduating from Siena College in 1949, then served in the United States Army in Europe from 1950 to 1952, writing for an Army newspaper. He began as a sports reporter for the Post-Star in Glens Falls, joined the Albany Times Union, and in 1956 moved to Puerto Rico to become the founding managing editor of the San Juan Star, where he struck up a lasting friendship with a young reporter named Hunter S. Thompson. In Puerto Rico he married Dana, a Broadway dancer, and they had three children, Dana, Katherine, and Brendan, and remained married until her death in 2023. Kennedy returned to Albany in 1963 and spent years as an investigative journalist, work that earned him a 1965 Pulitzer Prize nomination for a series on the city's ghettos and that fed directly into the fiction he had already begun writing about the same streets. His third Albany novel, Ironweed, was turned down by thirteen publishers before Saul Bellow, unasked, wrote to Viking Press urging them to reconsider it. Viking published the book in 1983, the same year Kennedy was named a MacArthur Fellow, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. He used part of the MacArthur grant to found the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany, which still brings visiting writers to campus today. Over eight novels making up the Albany Cycle, from Legs in 1975 to Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes in 2012, Kennedy has spent nearly his entire long life within a few miles of the city where he was born.