Soul Bootlegger

Abstract

Robert J. Begiebing reviews Bootlegger of the Soul: The Literary Legacy of William Kennedy (State University of New York Press), edited by Suzanne Lance and Paul Grondahl, a three-part collection of reviews, profiles, interviews, essays, tributes, creative work, and scholarship on the Albany novelist. Begiebing recounts Kennedy’s long struggle before the success of Ironweed, singles out essays on Kennedy’s journalism and on his female characters, and finds Kennedy’s own words the most rewarding part of the book. He accepts some unavoidable repetition, notes Kennedy’s tribute to Mailer, and draws parallels between the two writers’ tenacity and their view of the writer as historian and rebel.