Library of America to publish new edition of William Kennedy's 'Albany Trilogy'

Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Ironweed will be released by the publisher in March

By Sara Tracey, Managing Editor, Albany Times Union. Reprinted with permission

ALBANY — Three of William Kennedy’s celebrated novels about life in Albany will be published next year as a collection through the Library of America, a nonprofit publisher widely recognized as an authority on American writers and literature. 

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/The Albany Trilogy encompasses the first novels in his cycle of stories about the city: Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game and Ironweed, tales of defeat and redemption in New York’s capital during the Prohibition era. Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction after Ironweed was released in 1983. 

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Paul Grondahl, the Opalka Endowed Director of the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany — which Kennedy founded in 1983 — edited this new edition of the trilogy, adding a detailed chronology and endnotes that help contextualize Albany and Kennedy’s work for a wider array of readers. Irish writer Colum McCann penned an introduction to the collection, which is slated for release in March. 

The Library of America’s news release announcing the release compared Kennedy’s fictional project to the work of James Joyce and William Faulkner.

“With the Albany cycle, there are now eight interconnected novels that share some of the same characters and go across generations and centuries,” Grondahl said. “When you look at all the novels that fit together like jigsaw pieces, to collect three of his best novels in one volume in a really elegant publication, it’s great to see him put up on the very top of the shelf of American literature.” 

The cover on the new edition employs an image of Pearl Street from the Depression years, with the Kenmore Hotel’s sign prominent.

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Kennedy, 97, joins a small class of writers published by the Library of America that are still living when a volume has been published. The list also includes Maxine Hong Kingston, Gary Snyder and Adrienne Kennedy. John McPhee, another still-living author who won his Pulitzer Prize with “Annals of the Former World,” is also part of next year’s releases from the publisher.

In addition to Kennedy and McPhee, the library will also publish a sampling of Walt Whitman’s prose in On Democracy, a four-volume collection of John Steinbeck’s novels, The Testimony of Henry Adams, Freedman in front of a Senate committee in the 1880s, and a history of the Declaration of Independence and its rippling effects.

In celebration of that document and the country’s semiquincentennial, several reprints of Revolutionary War-era writings are slated in this same class, with collections of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and “American Antislavery Writings” included.

The library’s initial class, announced in a New York Times advertisement in 1982, included Mark Twain and Jack London, among others. 

“Bill is now getting into the pantheon,” Grondahl said. “(This is) a look at all the greatest American writers. This publisher, they enshrine our great writers.”