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William Kennedy: The Albany Trilogy

Legs | Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game | Ironweed

Edited by Colum McCann and Paul Grondahl

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In bookstores: April 28, 2026

Overview

Overview

Like William Faulkner and James Joyce, William Kennedy has transformed the place he knows best into a setting for universal human dramas. His tales of thwarted yearning, doomed ambition, and hard-won redemption have taken their place “among the most exuberant literary feats of the past half-century,” as Colum McCann writes in this volume’s introduction.

The first three novels of Kennedy’s Albany Cycle, unfolding during Prohibition and the Great Depression, form a coherent imaginative whole. Legs is a reconstruction of the real-life exploits of infamous gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond, capturing the brash energy of the capital city’s heyday in the 1920s and early ’30s. Mining the “truths and secret lies” of Legs’s rise and fall, Kennedy delves deeply into our collective fascination with underworld kingpins, casting Diamond’s success and celebrity 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.”

In Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, the life of crime is stripped of any such illicit glamour. Billy, a smalltime gambler and pool hustler at the end of his luck, is roped into negotiations to free the nephew of Albany’s political boss from kidnappers. In refusing to compromise his personal moral code, Billy runs afoul of the city’s Irish American machine and faces the utter ruthlessness of its power.

Ironweed catapulted Kennedy to overnight literary stardom, earning him a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Francis Phelan, Billy’s father and a once-promising ballplayer, is now a wandering alcoholic, a haunted wraith of a man who returns to Albany looking to make peace with his life’s misfortunes. Ever timely in its treatment of poverty and homelessness, Ironweed reveals the depths of Kennedy’s remarkable empathy; as Saul Bellow observed, he “could take material from skid row and write about these people as fully human as anyone else. . . . He wrote about them from the inside.”

Prepared in consultation with the author, this definitive Library of America edition also includes, as an appendix, an essay about Legs Diamond 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.

Colum McCann, editor, is the internationally best-selling author of the novels Apeirogon, TransAtlantic, Let the Great World Spin, Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs, as well as three critically acclaimed story collections and the nonfiction books Letters to a Young Writer and American Mother. He is cofounder of the global nonprofit organization Narrative 4, which operates in forty-two countries and uses storytelling to propel community action and change.

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 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.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Publication support for William Kennedy: The Albany Trilogy was provided by Pernille Aegidius Dake, Christine and George R. Hearst III, Chet and Karen Opalka and the Opalka Family Donor Advised Fund, Suzanne Lance and George Sloan, Alice Green and Charles Touhey, the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany, and the University at Albany Foundation.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-841-0 768 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 397 Library of America Series

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