05/21/2026
At 98, William Kennedy enters pantheon of American literature
NYS Writers Institute
The first three books of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's Albany cycle have been published in new Library of America edition, “William Kennedy: The Albany Trilogy”
By Paul Grondahl, first published in the Albany Times Union May 20, 2026
Reprinted with permission.
Colum McCann was wrapping up his remarks about William Kennedy, calling the novelist’s work “deeply moral and empathetic and courageous.”
I was standing next to Kennedy in the wings, a few feet from the podium where McCann was speaking. Kennedy was feverishly making notations in the margins about which sections he planned to read of his 1983 novel “Ironweed” — as usual, revising right up to the last moment.
McCann finished, people clapped, and I said to Bill, “It’s time.”
I pushed Kennedy in his wheelchair to the center of the stage of the Recital Hall at the University at Albany’s Performing Arts Center. It is a shimmering jewel box, and I positioned him in the brightest pool of stage lights until he glowed.
And then, the entire audience, about 150 people, spontaneously rose to their feet as one and showered Kennedy with applause.
“I want to stand up,” he whispered to me.
I faced him, planted my feet and grabbed under his armpits. “On three,” I said. On the count, with every ounce of strength, he pushed off the wheelchair armrests, I pulled up, and he willed his 98-year-old body to a standing position on wobbly, stick-thin legs.
The applause washed over him like a warm bath and he soaked it in. The audience remained on its feet. Time stood still. I moved a half-step behind him. You don’t upstage the Bootlegger of the Soul.
From my vantage point, as he bowed his head and made a hand salute of gratitude, like a doff of a cap, the tableau reminded me of Babe Ruth bidding farewell to the Yankee Stadium crowd on June 13,
1948. It was a ceremony to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the stadium, often called “The House That Ruth Built,” and to retire his uniform number 3. The photograph, titled “The Babe Bows Out,” by Nathaniel “Nat” Fein of the New York Herald Tribune, won the Pulitzer Prize.
Watching Bill Kennedy soak in the loving ovation of family, friends and generations of readers of his Albany cycle of novels felt momentous, in a Ruthian vein.
The occasion last Tuesday was a celebration and book launch for a new Library of America edition titled “William Kennedy: The Albany Trilogy.” He is among a handful of living authors who have received this high literary honor. He joins his heroes on the very top shelf of American letters, including Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, Flannery O’Connor and a coterie of other exceptional authors whose work epitomizes the nation’s history and culture in all its messy truths.
Several generous donors who contributed support to make the publication possible were in the audience, on their feet and applauding. The Library of America is a nonprofit organization that has relied on grants and donations to produce its timeless, definitive volumes since its founding in 1979.
Kennedy now belongs in the pantheon of the most acclaimed authors in the history of American literature. Not bad for a working-class kid from North Albany who grew up in a modest flat with few books. He willed himself to stand among those literary giants through grit and a refusal to quit, an act of self-invention.
I was an editor of the volume with McCann. Rereading the edition’s trilogy — “Legs,” “Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game” and “Ironweed” — line by line, with an indexer’s eye to create exhaustive end notes and a detailed chronology, I observed the interior architecture of Kennedy’s stunning prose anew.
I held a wireless microphone close to Bill’s mouth as he read from the new volume, perched on his lap as he sat in the wheelchair. Those lucky souls in the Recital Hall were treated to one of the finest readings I have heard the author give in the 45 years I have known him.
“Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods,” he read from the opening of “Ironweed.”
He delivered expertly curated excerpts of Francis Phelan confronting the grave of his infant son, Gerald. The baby was 13 days old when Francis dropped him accidentally on his head after drinking at a local tavern. The death sent Francis on the bum for 22 years before his return and reckoning in North Albany on All Saints’ Day, 1938. The novel is a deep meditation on shame, loss and the human desire for forgiveness and redemption. The writing is shot through with black humor and profound sorrow, side by side in the same sentence, that knife edge that the great Irish writers can balance their prose upon.
As Kennedy read, I could hear the audience’s emotions rising and falling, like a wave, an outburst of laughter followed by a deep sigh. I was holding the mic, but wished I had a free hand to dab a tissue to my eyes when he read this: “It’s okay with me if I don’t have no headstone,” Francis said to Rudy, “just so’s I don’t die alone.”
The book signing line afterward looped around the vast Futterer Lounge. Bill welcomed generations of friends and fans, some of whom had known him for better than 60 years. The lovefest went on for more than 90 minutes.
Bill’s son, Brendan, hosted an after-party at his elegant Troy brownstone. Before long, the singing commenced, a hallmark of any Kennedy gathering. Red wine and Jameson flowed. McCann and Kennedy toasted each other in carefully crafted superlatives befitting two Irish American prose masters.
“I think this night might be the happiest I’ve ever been,” Kennedy said, to which his children Brendan, Kathy and Dana paused a beat and shot him withering glances. So Irish.
A chorus of singers in a circle of chairs rose on the refrain of “Molly Malone” with the lyrics: “As she wheeled her wheelbarrow/Through streets wide and narrow/Crying, ‘Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!’”
The room fell silent, and I needed a tissue again as we slid into “The Parting Glass” with its elegiac farewell.
John Curtin of Albany Distilling Co. led the benediction in the wee hours by opening a bottle of limited edition 10-year-old rye whiskey to celebrate the distillery’s 15-year anniversary. Curtin uncorked it like a holy relic. We sipped that smooth, aged ambrosia. A whiskey barrel normally produces about 300 bottles, but Curtin told me he got just 150 bottles of the 10-year rye. The rest was the “angel’s share,” a poetic term used by distillers to describe the portion of the spirit lost to evaporation as it ages in a wooden cask.
The first novel Kennedy tried to write in Puerto Rico in 1959 had a working title of “The Angels and the Sparrows.” It was never published, but it marked the earliest iteration of the Phelan family in Kennedy’s fiction.
It would be a few more hours until the sparrows began to sing in downtown Troy, but we had given Bill Kennedy the angel’s share that night. And amen to all that.
Paul Grondahl is the Opalka Endowed Director of the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany and a former Times Union reporter. He can be reached at [email protected]
