William Kennedy: The Albany Trilogy (LOA #397)

A landmark of American historical fiction for the first time in a deluxe collector’s edition

Prohibition-Era Albany comes to life in a trilogy of novels of crime and corruption, hope and redemption

Unfolding in Albany during Prohibition and the Depression, here are three intertwined tales of thwarted yearning, doomed ambition, and hard-won resilience that are now “among the most exuberant literary feats of the past half-century,” as Colum McCann writes in this volume’s Introduction.

• Legs (1975) brilliantly envisions the exploits of infamous gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond in the early 1930s. Mining the “truths and secret lies” of Legs’s story, the novel delves deeply into our collective fascination with the underworld, casting Legs’s criminal career as an alternative version of the American Dream—“the dream,” Kennedy writes, “that you can grow up and shoot your way to fame and fortune.”
• Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978) strips criminality of all illicit glamour, as its hero, a gambler and pool hustler at the end of his luck, runs afoul of the corrupt Irish American machine that calls the shots in Depression-era Albany.
• Ironweed (1983) catapulted Kennedy into overnight literary stardom, earning him a Pulitzer Prize, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Francis Phelan, Billy’s father and once a promising ballplayer, is now a homeless alcoholic, a haunted wraith of a man who returns to Albany looking to make peace with his life’s misfortunes. 

The Albany Trilogy also includes, in an appendix, an essay about Legs Diamonds and the speculation about who might have killed him, along with useful explanatory notes and a newly researched Chronology of Kennedy’s life and career.WILLIAM KENNEDY (b. 1928), a novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and essayist hailing from Albany, NY, is best known for his Albany cycle of novels, currently a series of eight interconnected books. The founding director of the New York State Writers Institute, he has been the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Ironweed. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1993 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002, and was named a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France.   

PAUL GRONDAHL, editor, is the Opalka Endowed Director of the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany. He was a staff writer at the Albany Times Union from 1984 to 2017, winning numerous local, state and national prizes for his work, and now writes a weekly column for the newspaper. He is the author of several books, including political biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Albany Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd.