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 Legs
“Dynamite...Legs is what a novel is supposed to be.”—The Washington
Post Book World
“A brilliant novel, a truly creative piece of work . . . like any
real artist, Kennedy takes what is really a sordid, vulgar reality
and turns it into a human tragedy.”—Mario Puzo
“Pure literary excitement...easy to read and hard to put down. I
enjoed it from beginning to end and wished it were longer.”—Joseph
Heller
More Praise for William Kennedy
“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'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
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
