William Kennedy's first book was kind of poor, "The Ink Truck", and he was one of the writers of the dreadful Coppola/Evans' film "Cotton Club". Other than those two very different failures he's never taken a wrong step. He wear's his influences well - the daring insight of his idolized James Joyce combining with the shrewd humanistic vision and descriptive power of Dickens. Like Faulkner he has set himself into a place that he writes about with variant skill and power, letting the landscape play as a character and influence on his stories. While Faulkner's milieu was fictional, Kennedy's is not; Albany, New York.
So that when Kennedy retold the legend of Legs Diamond the scenes crackled with the same geographical intensity that Chandler brought to Los Angeles, and Joyce brought to Dublin.
His book, Ironweed, the story of a base ball player who flees life and becomes a hobo because he killed his son, won a Pulitzer Prize. It deserved it. The book is savage, funny, surreal, lyrical and exciting and it is all those things at once. More importantly this book, and all of his books, force us to see human beings to be as real as we find ourselves.
There are sections of "Quinn's Book" that make you gasp with excitement, parts of the "The Flaming Corsage" make you yearn for a love that works spiritually and carnally, the sort of love that drives women mad and turns men into dangerous fools.
His novels are fascinating. I find his essays and his straight history of Albany to be a bit dry and preachy, but that personal preference doesn't alter the fact that he is one of the greatest living American Authors. He's modern and neglected which seems to justify his brilliance. And, yeah, he's a heck of a nice guy who loves life. He's 77 today.