Ironweed: Pulitzer Prize Winner (A Novel) [Paperback]

Winner of The Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the third in Kennedy’s Albany cycle, Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, and full-time bum with the gift of gab, has hit bottom. Years earlier he’d left Albany after he dropped his infant son accidentally, and the boy died.  Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and present.

“Rich in plot and dramatic tension . . . almost Joycean in its variety of rhetoric . . . the novel goes straight for the throat and the funnybone.”
–The New York Times

“Astonishing . . . Kennedy’s ambitious vision and soaring imaginative powers make this book one of the richest, most startling, and most satisfying novels of recent years.”
–The Philadelphia Inquirer

“A beautifully sorrowful novel.  Kennedy asks us again to confront the mystery of human behavior.  And as he illuminates it, we share in one’s man’s struggle to understand his life.”
–The Washington Post

“Kennedy’s power is such that the reader will follow him almost anywhere, to the edge of tragedy and back again to redemption.”
– The Wall Street Journal

William Kennedy, author, screenwriter and playwright, was born and raised in Albany, New York. Kennedy brought his native city to literary life in many of his works. The Albany cycle, includesLegs,Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and the Pulitzer Prize winningIronweed.The versatile Kennedy wrote the screenplay forIronweed, the playGrand View, and cowrote the screenplay for theThe Cotton Clubwith Francis Ford Coppola. Kennedy also wrote the nonfictionO lS4