Kennedy, William

William Joseph Kennedy (born January 16, 1928) is an American writer and journalist who won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for his novel Ironweed. Many of his novels feature the interactions of members of the fictional Irish-American Phelan family in Albany, New York. The novels make use of incidents from the city's history as well as the supernatural. Kennedy's works include The Ink Truck (1969), Legs (1975), Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978), Ironweed (1983), Roscoe (2002) and Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (2011). One reviewer said of Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes that it was "written with such brio and encompassing humanity that it may well deserve to be called the best of the bunch".Kennedy also published a nonfiction book entitled O Albany!: Improbable City of Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated Scoundrels (1983).