Legs - by William Kennedy (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed explores an era of American innocene and corruption in the first novel in his Albany cycle.

"The best novel about a criminal legend I've ever read."--Hunter S. Thompson

True to both life and legend, Legs brilliantly evokes the flamboyant career of gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond. Through the equivocal eyes of Diamond's attorney, Marcus Gorman (who scraps a promising political career for the more elemental excitement of the criminal underworld), we watch as Legs and his showgirl mistress, Kiki Roberts, blaze their gaudy trail across the tabloid pages of the 1920s and 1930s.

William Kennedy's Albany Cycle of novels reflect what he once described as the fusion of his imagination with a single place. A native and longtime resident of Albany, New York, his work moves from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, chronicling family life, the city's netherworld, and its spheres of power--financial, ethnic, political--often among the Irish-Americans who dominated the city in this period. The novels in his cycle include, Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn's Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe.

Review Quotes

Praise for Legs

"Dynamite...Legs is what a novel is supposed to be."--The Washington Post Book World

"A brilliant novel, a truly creative piece of work . . . like any real artist, Kennedy takes what is really a sordid, vulgar reality and turns it into a human tragedy."--Mario Puzo

"Pure literary excitement...easy to read and hard to put down. I enjoed it from beginning to end and wished it were longer."--Joseph Heller

More Praise for William Kennedy

"Kennedy's justly acclaimed Albany Cycle [is] one of the imperishable products of American literature since the Second World War. These books can be read singly or in sequence, but read they must be. Kennedy is one of our necessary writers."--GQ

"Kennedy's novels have the rough feel of stories told, not of chapters written and artfully polished. His beguiling yarns are the kind of family myths embellished and retold across a kitchen table late at night, whiskified, raunchy, darkly funny, tangles of old resentments and fresh exasperations."--TIME

About the Author

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, includes Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and the Pulitzer Prize winning Ironweed.The versatile Kennedy wrote the screenplay for Ironweed, the play Grand View, and cowrote the screenplay for the The Cotton Club with Francis Ford Coppola. Kennedy also wrote the nonfiction O Albany! and Riding the Yellow Trolley Car. Some of the other works he is known for include Roscoe and Very Old Bones.

Kennedy is the founding director of the New York State Writers Institute and, in 1993, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has received numerous literary awards, including the Literary Lions Award from the New York Public Library, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Governor's Arts Award. Kennedy was also named Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France and a member of the board of directors of the New York State Council for the Humanities.