William Kennedy: The Albany Trilogy (LOA #397): Legs / Billy Phelan's Greatest Game / Ironweed

A landmark of American historical fiction for the first time in a deluxe collector’s edition

Prohibition-Era Albany comes to life in a trilogy of novels of crime and corruption, hope and redemption

Unfolding in Albany during Prohibition and the Depression, here are three intertwined tales of thwarted yearning, doomed ambition, and hard-won resilience that are now “among the most exuberant literary feats of the past half-century,” as Colum McCann writes in this volume’s Introduction.

• Legs (1975) brilliantly envisions the exploits of infamous gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond in the early 1930s. Mining the “truths and secret lies” of Legs’s story, the novel delves deeply into our collective fascination with the underworld, casting Legs’s criminal career 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.”
• Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978) strips criminality of all illicit glamour, as its hero, a gambler and pool hustler at the end of his luck, runs afoul of the corrupt Irish American machine that calls the shots in Depression-era Albany.
• Ironweed (1983) catapulted Kennedy into overnight literary stardom, earning him a Pulitzer Prize, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Francis Phelan, Billy’s father and once a promising ballplayer, is now a homeless alcoholic, a haunted wraith of a man who returns to Albany looking to make peace with his life’s misfortunes. 

The Albany Trilogy also includes, in an appendix, an essay about Legs Diamonds 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.