Description

Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory meet with William Kennedy in August of 1983 in his house in Averill Park, New York. The interview begins with a discussion of Kennedy’s residence in Albany and how it has informed his fiction. Kennedy discusses his time as a journalist in Puerto Rico and how the combination of being away from Albany for several years as well as his work in journalism helped form the more journalistic aspects of fiction centered on the history of Albany. The discussion centers around how Albany becomes more than just a setting for the fiction but actually a character in its own right. Kennedy explains that the downside to all of this is that the research necessary to be true to the history of the city means that he gets bogged down doing the research and it can distract him from the actual writing. A number of questions concern the use of political history in the books and how they can reflect a larger political history and how that can also be reflected in the fiction of other authors not thought of primarily as political writers. The final 70 minutes of the interview hinge around the differences between novels and films and if films can do the same things that a novel can do. An edited version of this interview appears on pages 151 to 174 of Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s, ed. Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, 1987, University of Illinois Press. The final 70 minutes of the interview are not reflected in the published version.