“The dead, they got all the eyes” (223).
“Who cares about bums? And especially bums in Albany,” said William Kennedy of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Ironweed. The third book in his Albany Cycle, Ironweed was preceded by the first novel in the series Legs which went through eight different versions and was written over a period of six years; and then Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game which took about two years to finish. Both novels came and went with minimal attention so when William Kennedy returned with his third installment in the Albany Cycle seven months later, it was rejected no less than thirteen times (Saul Bellow was actually the one who persuaded Viking Press to take up the book’s publication). It turned out to be the right bet as Ironweed was quickly featured prominently in reviews by The New York Times Book Review and the Los Angeles Times. Vaulting William Kennedy’s literary career into critical acclaim, Ironweed won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Award in 1984. Kennedy then also won a coveted MacArthur fellowship (he used the $264,000 grant money to seed what would become known as the New York State Writers Institute). Ironweed has since been featured on many “best of” lists, including at #92 on the Modern Library list of 100 20th Century English novels, and even Harold Bloom listed it among his works of the Western Canon.
Ironweed is a somber, lyrical novel about a “filthy bum” during the Great Depression who returns to his hometown of Albany to face his troubled past. Ironweed follows 58-year-old Francis “Franny” Aloysius Phelan, a former Big-League baseball player for the Washington Senators who used to work on trolley cars before fleeing Albany after an incident during a trolley strike in which he threw a rock, crushing the skull of a scab named Harold Allen (this led to an uprising as two more people were also shot dead by the National Guard, and another was butted by a rifle, while a third was shot dead trying to board a boxcar alongside Francis). After living on the road for three years, Francis then returned home to his family only to face another mishap –while changing the diaper of his thirteen-day-old son, Gerald, Francis tragically dropped him on the floor, snapping the child’s neck in a horrifying accident. Unable to accept this, Francis fled again, living the life of an alcoholic drifter all over the country for twenty-two years, before he finally decided to return to Albany again. This is where Ironweed begins.
All throughout the novel, Francis is haunted by the ghosts of his past; his almost magical realist hallucinations of deceased characters often commune with him as if they are living. Are the ghosts real? Or are they merely the phantasms of an alcoholic mind? In a 1983 interview with Larry McCaffery Kennedy stated that the ghosts “probably came more from Our Town and Dickens than from Marquez.” Now, a floppy-shoed nearly-toothless bum, Francis takes a day job as a gravedigger at the Saint Agnes Cemetery in order to earn some drinking money and pay his debts to Marcus Gorman and Edward Daugherty who helped him beat a legal charge after he registered some twenty-one different times to vote. Here in the cemetery, he locates “the neighborhood of the Phelans” where he speaks with his late mother and father, the latter of whom died in a train accident. Francis also speaks with his dead son Gerald, apologizing for what happened and acknowledging that he’d only had a few beers that night.
Francis has spent the last nine years in an on-and-off relationship with a fellow drifter named Helen Archer, a Vassar alumna who once had dreams of being a singer but has since contracted a cancerous tumor (like Francis, she has also been haunted by her past, her father committed suicide). Across the three sacred days of All Hallows Eve (the final night of October 1938, or “the unruly night when grace is always in short supply and the old and the new dead walk abroad in this land”), to All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day, we follow both Francis and Helen as they scum around the streets of Albany, searching for money, booze, and a place to sleep. Francis sometimes sleeps outside under cardboard among the naturally sprouting ironweeds. William Kennedy draws our attention to these unique weeds with an adapted quotation from The Audubon Society’s Field Guide to North American Wildflowers which explains that “tall Ironweed is a member of the Sunflower Family (Asteraceae). It has a tall erect stem and bears deep purple-blue flower heads in loose terminal clusters. Its leaves are long and thin and pointed, their lower surfaces downy. Its fruit is seed-like, with a double set of purplish bristles. It flowers from August to October in damp, rich soil from New York south to Georgia, west to Louisiana, north to Missouri, Illinois and Michigan. The name refers to the toughness of the stem.” The title “ironweed” suggests that the “bums” who sleep in the outdoors are similar to these durable plants –they are tough as iron, and burdened by a thorny past. Along the way with Francis, we meet a colorful cast of Irish-Americans in Albany’s vagrant community: like Pee Wee and Reverend Chester (the managers of the charitable mission which provides food and temporary shelter), Sandra (a former Alaskan prostitute who suddenly dies in the cold after her skin is eaten by stray dogs), a singing barman named Oscar, Clara and Jack (friends of Francis and Helen), Rosskam the ragman (who hires Francis to help him for a day lugging his junk wagon), Old Shoes Gilligan, Little Red, Andy “Which One,” and many others. Notably, the life of a bum is portrayed as fairly grotesque –we are treated to scenes of diarrhea, vomiting, and women who are forced to prostitute themselves for survival; “Fornication was standard survival currency everywhere, was it not?” (89).
As Francis and Helen float between the Gilded Cage saloon and the mission, we learn some of their backstory –Francis initially met Helen at a New York bar, and she once worked in a piano store where the owner apparently took advantage of her. We also learn that Francis has killed several other people –a fact he is not proud of— including “Rowdy Dick” Doolan who once tried to cut off Francis’s feet with a cleaver along with part of his nose and finger, and Aldo Campione, a horse thief Francis failed to rescue from a hail of police bullets back in 1901. Francis is also tormented by early erotic experiences he had with his first love, a neighbor named Katrina Daugherty. He once saved her from public scandal when he found her roaming naked through the streets alone. He carried her home, but she later died in a fire in 1912 (her ghost now appears to Francis). At any rate, as Francis and Helen roam, we are given a unique glimpse of the city of Albany from Pearl Street to Broadway, in addition to the Colonie Street (where Francis was raised). Ironweed is a city novel of sorts. And after having been away for so long, Francis frequently comments on the changing landmarks in Albany that he once revered as a kid, many of which have since vanished and technological changes have given way to new modes of transportation, sending Francis’s beloved carbarn trolleys out of fashion –“’Terrific machines, but now they’re goin’” (21). I found these reflections to be fascinating –in some ways they reminded me of other Pulitzer Prize-winning novels like Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, but perhaps the more apt comparison for Ironweed is to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
While Helen goes to a hotel, she solemnly surrounds herself with belongings, puts on music from Beethoven, and then harrowingly dies alone in her hotel room (presumably succumbing to her painful stomach tumor), and Francis –unaware of her death– picks up a turkey and brings it to his long-lost wife, Annie, a woman he has not seen for twenty-two years. In utter shock at suddenly seeing her husband on her doorstep, Annie surprisingly welcomes Francis inside the house and they speak together for a while:
“There was no way he could reveal all that had brought him here. It would have meant the recapitulation not only of all his sins but of all his fugitive and fallen dreams, all his random movement across the country and back, all his returns to this city only to leave again without ever coming to see her, them, without ever knowing why he didn’t. It would have meant the anatomizing of his compulsive violence and his fear of justice, of his time with Helen, his present defection from Helen, his screwing so many women he really wanted nothing to do with, his drunken ways, his morning-after sickness, his sleeping in the weeds, his bumming money from strangers not because there was a depression but first to help Helen and then because it was easy: easier than working. Everything was easier than coming home, even reducing yourself to the level of social maggot, streetside slug” (160).
Then in a moving scene Francis has a meal with his estranged family, Annie and his two children (Billy and Margaret “Peg”), though Peg is initially resistant to her father’s presence in the home. Annie and Francis spend some time in the family attic where they dig up old newspaper clippings, photos, and baseball memorabilia from Francis’s glory days. But when it comes time to part ways, Annie offers Francis the opportunity to sleep on a cot in the house where he can learn to readjust to life at home. She admits that even after all this time, she has never taken another lover. She has remained faithful to Francis. Despite this somewhat shocking admission of loyalty to a bum like Francis, he still refuses her. Why? Because he feels “he was too profane a being to live among them.” Instead, Francis heads back out into the cold and rejoins his cancerous drinking buddy Rudy Newton. They head up to a shantytown called the “jungle” –“an asphalt, a graveyard, and a fugitive city… It was a city of essential transiency and would-be permanency, a resort of those for whom motion was either anathema or pointless or impossible” (208). And shortly thereafter he emotionally confesses his dark secret to his fellow bums –that he accidentally killed his infant son (though none of them seem fazed and it feels like a somewhat underwhelming moment for Francis). But then raiders suddenly infiltrate the camp, setting fires and assaulting all the “filthy bums.” They strike down Rudy but Francis steals one of their bats and brutally breaks the back of one of the men and kneecaps another before rescuing Rudy and carrying him all the way to a hospital where they share one final smile together before Rudy dies. Death seems to follow Francis everywhere he goes. The novel ends as Francis flees again, train-hopping his way from Albany. He is once again a murderer on the run.
In some ways, Ironweed reminded me of several earlier Pulitzer Prize-winners, like A Death in the Family by James Agee; both novels are somber, poetic, austere, reflective works that contemplate the complicated nature of guilt, grief, and death. There is great beauty in this sorrow. As Ironweed unfolds, we learn to sympathize with Francis for being a tortured moralist whose guilt only propels the story forward, and he admits “My guilt is all that I have left. If I lose it, I have stood for nothing, done nothing, been nothing.” Despite all the tragedy in his life, Francis is not necessarily a bad man, just a tormented soul. Additionally, a subtext of Irish-Catholic faith pervades the text, and Kennedy gives a nod to the great Catholic poet Dante with an epigraph from Purgatorio at the outset: “To course o’er better waters now hoists sail the little bark of my wit, leaving behind her sea so cruel.” Elsewhere, I read that Ironweed closely mirrors the Divine Comedy, but I must have missed this compaison in the novel. Nevertheless, I found Ironweed to be a spiritually powerful, deeply enticing novel. Ironweed is that rare city novel in American literature that successfully explores both a city and a man, both of whom are facing significant strife –William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle reflects what he once described as “the fusion of his imagination with a single place.” Ironweed garnered praise from The Washington Post which dubbed it “a lyric work of fiction about the life of a bum,” Saul Bellow declared it “distinguished,” the Guardian praised its “dark lyricism,” and in The New York Times George Stade noted that, despite his initial prejudices, he found Ironweed to be “intermittently lyrical and self-consciously mythifying” in addition to William Kennedy being “tough-minded and defiant humanism has left me chastened but feeling good.”
Notable Quotations
“Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling olf truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods” (opening line).
“Francis’s mother twitched nervously in her grave as the truck carried him nearer to her; and Francis’s father lit his pipe, smiled at his wife’s discomfort, and looked out from his own bit of sod to catch a glimpse of how much his son had changed since the train accident” (1-2).
“Francis knew how to drink. He drank all the time and he did not vomit. He drank anything that contained alcohol, anything, and he could always walk, and he could talk as well as any man alive about what was on his mind” (5).
“In the cemetery, Kathryn Phelan, sensing the militance in her son’s mood, grew restless at the idea that death was about to change for her. With a furtive burst of energy she wove another cross from the shallow-rooted weeds above her and quickly swallowed it, but was disappointed by the taste. Weeds appealed to Kathryn Phelan in direct ratio to the length of their roots. The longer the weed the more repulsive the cross” (8-9).
“Francis decided this would be a fine place to be buried. The hill had a nice flow to it that carried you down the grass and out onto the river , and then across the water and up through the trees on the far shore to the top of the hills, all in one swoop. Being dead here would situate a man in place and time. It would give a man neighbors, even some of them really old folks, like those antique dead ones at the foot of the lawn: Tobias Banion, Elisha Skinner, Elsie Whipple, all crumbling under their limestone headstones from which the snows, sands, and acids of reduction were slowly removing their names. But what did the perpetuation of names really matter? Ah well, there were those for whom death, like life, would always be a burden of eminence. The progeny of those growing nameless at the foot of the hill were ensured a more durable memory. Their new, and heavier, marble stones higher up on the slope had been cut doubly deep so their names would remain visible for an eternity, at last” (13).
“In his grave, a cruciformed circle, Gerald watched the advent of his father and considered what action might be appropriate to their meeting. Should he absolve the man of all guilt, not for the dropping, for that was accidental, but for the abandonment of the family, for craven flight when the steadfast virtues were called for? Gerald’s grave trembled with superb possibility. Denied speech in life, having died with only monosyllabic goos and gaahs in his vocabulary, Gerald possessed the gift of tongues in death” (17).
“They both knew intimately the etiquette, the taboos, the protocol of bums. By their talk to each other they understood that they shared a belief in the brotherhood of the desolate; yet in the scars of their eyes they confirmed that no such fraternity had ever existed, that the only brotherhood they belonged to was the one that asked that enduring question: How do I get through the next twenty minutes? They feared drys, cops, jailers, bosses, moralists, crazies, truth-tellers, and one another. They love storytellers, liars, whores, fighters, singers, collie dogs that wagged their tails, and generous bandits. Rudy, thought Francis: he’s just a bum, but who ain’t?” (23-24, on Francis and his friend Rudy).
“He looked up at the full moon, a silver cylinder illuminating this night for bleeding women and frothing madmen, and which warmed him with the enormous shadow it thrust forward in his own path” (45).
“Francis saw the street that lay before him: Pearl Street, the central vessel of this city, city once his, city lost” (63).
“I believe we die when we can’t stand it anymore. I believe we stand as much as we can and then we die when we can…” (65).
“…Francis began to run, and in doing so, reconstituted a condition that was as pleasurable to his being as it was natural: the running of bases after the crack of the bat, the running from accusation, the running from the calumny of men and women, the running from family, from bondage, from destitution of spirit through ritualistic straightenings, the running, finally in a quest for pure flight as a fulfilling mannerism of the spirit” (75).
“He had stood staunchly irresolute in the face of capricious and adverse fate” (75).
“He walked with an empty soul toward the north star, magnetized by an impulse to redirect his destiny. He had slept in the weeds of a South End vacant lot too many times. He would do it no more” (87).
“In her nakedness on that continuing Tuesday and Thursday and unchanging Friday, Helen now sees the spoiled seed of a woman’s barren dream: a seed that germinates and grows into a shapeless, windblown weed blossom of no value to anything, even its own species, for it produces no seed of its own; a mutation that grows only into the lovely day like all other wild things, and then withers, and perishes, and falls, and vanishes” (126-127, Helen on the piano store owner of her youth).
“One never knows the potential within the human breast” (127).
“There are nice people in the world and sometimes you meet them. Sometimes” (128).
“But after a while you stand up, wipe the frost out of your ear, go someplace to get warm, bum a nickel for coffee, and then start walkin’ toward somewhere else that ain’t no bridge” (146).
“Yet here he was in this aerie of reconstitutable time, touching untouchable artifacts of a self that did not yet know it was ruined, just as the ball, in its inanimate ignorance, did not know yet that it was going nowhere, was caught” (169).
“Why’ve you come back like a ghost we buried years ago to force a scrawny turkey on us? Is that your idea of restitution for letting us fend for ourselves for twenty-two years” (178-179).
“By now, with those events so deeply dead and buried, with his own guilt having so little really to do with it, he saw the strike as simply the insanity of the Irish, poor against poor, a race, a class divided against itself” (207).
“The dead, they got all the eyes” (223).
“He had a vision of Gerald swaddled in the silvery web of his grave, and then the vision faded like the stars and he could not even remember the color of the child’s hair… and he knew then that he was leaving behind more than a city and a lifetime of corpses” (224).
The 1984 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1984 Fiction Jury consisted of:
- William K. Robertson, Chair was the long-serving editor and book critic at the Miami Herald. As far as I can tell, he is alive as of the I am writing. He has been a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, himself, in the categories of Criticism and Specialized Reporting.
- Thomas R. Edwards (1928-2005) Professor of English at Rutgers University from 1964-1993 an editor of the Raritan. He graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College and received his PhD from Harvard University in 1956. He earned a Guggenheim fellowship as well as an ACLS fellowship. His book Imagination and Power was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1971. He also was a book reviewer for the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review. He was survived by his wife and two children.
- David Bradley (1950-present) was a professor of English at Temple University (1976—1996) before being fired/quitting in a dispute with the university over his workload. But he apparently took them to court over a breach of contract and won. He was then an associate professor of fiction at the University of Oregon (2003-2013) and wrote scripts in Hollywood. He is the author of South Street and The Chaneysville Incident, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1982. He also won an O. Henry Award in 1981. Bradley received a BA in creative writing from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and an MA in United States Studies from the University of London in 1974.
In the fiction jury report letter from William K. Robertson to Robin Kuzin (assistant administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes) the jury outlined three finalists: The Feud by Thomas Berger, Cathedral by Raymond Carver, and Ironweed by William Kennedy. However, the jury unanimously selected The Feud by Thomas Berger for the prize. They wrote: “For 25 years Berger has probed our most sacred received wisdom and found it not only lacking but in some cases profane. Berger knows the conventions of fiction about the recent and distant American past, and he turns them on their ear. With style, wit and a gritty realism, he demystifies the nostalgia and romanticism that have kept Americans from seeing the truth about themselves.”
Regarding Thomas Berger’s The Feud, the jury wrote that it is “a story of two hostile families in a small town during the 1930s, Berger peels back layers of myth to show that irrational mutual suspicion and hair-trigger anger have far more serious –as well as comic—consequences than our glorification of such qualities has permitted us to believe. Yet even as he lays bare these truths, he retains a sympathetic understanding of why his characters and act as they do… Thomas Berger’s work is a major accomplishment in American letters.”
The jury’s second choice was William Kennedy’s Ironweed: a novel that also “…has an American voice. It recounts how a former big-league baseball player, now a hobo and wino, returns to his hometown of Albany, his city. Using a rich mixture of reality and fantasy, Kennedy creates a universe out of a single place and reminds us of the human characteristics we share with those we consider society’s outcasts.”
The jury’s final nominee was Raymond Carver’s Cathedral: a short story collection “is a model of economy and precisely observed physical detail. His carefully constructed miniatures reveal more about lives in transient –usually those of men in middle age and of ordinary talent—than writers who attempt to beguile on a more grandiose scale.”
However, 1984 was one of those infamous years wherein the Pulitzer 15-member board overturned 10 of 12 juries’ first selections in the journalism categories and rejected the unanimous choices of both the fiction and general nonfiction categories. Afterward, William K. Robertson –as editor of the Miami Herald— penned an open letter in the Miami Herald asking what use the juries serve at all. “Never before in the history of the prizes have so many done so much that was disregarded by so few,” he said. Several other jury members in other categories went public to voice their own frustrations, as well.
Also in 1984 a Special Pulitzer Prize was issued to Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) “For his special contribution over nearly half a century to the education and enjoyment of America’s children and their parents.”
Who Is William Kennedy?
William Joseph Kennedy (1928- ) was born January 16, 1928, in Albany’s North End, the only child of working-class Irish-Catholic parents William and Mary Kennedy. He started writing for the school newspaper in Albany and for the Post Star in Glens Falls as a sports reporter. He carried on with his writing through college and into his first job (after being drafted into the army where he worked for an Army paper in Europe). After being discharged, he worked at the Albany Times Union where he documented the triangulations and corruption in the state capital of New York. He graduated from Siena College in Loudonville, New York in 1949.
All throughout this period, Kennedy wrote short stories but all of them were rejected. Restless at all short story rejections, he took a job in Puerto Rico in 1956 working for the newly founded newspaper called the San Juan Star. It was here that Kennedy met Saul Bellow who was teaching in Puerto Rico (Kennedy took his class). The two struck up a friendship and Bellow significantly advocated for Kennedy’s writing which boosted his literary career. He also befriended Hunter S. Thompson and met his future wife, Dana (born Ana) Sosa, a Broadway actress and dancer with whom he would have three children.
Kennedy returned to his Albany in 1963 where he worked for the Times Union as an investigative journalist, exposing the activities of Democratic politicians in the orbit of Daniel P. O’Connell. In fact, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1965 for a series of articles on the slums and poverty in Albany at the time. These articles provided the basis for his later nonfiction work O Albany! (1983).
Kennedy published his first novel The Ink Truck in 1969. The novel’s main character is a columnist who leads a strike at his newspaper in Albany. When Ironweed was set for publication (after famously being rejected by thirteen publishers), his first two novels in the Albany Cycle (which were already out of print by this point) were now being reprinted. Two days before his 55th birthday, January 16, 1983, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship of $264,000. Then that following January he received the notification that he had won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Ironweed, and then in April the Pulitzer Prize, as well. Notably, the Pulitzer Prize was awarded the same day that his grandson Casey Rafferty was born. Kennedy was also a finalist for the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction that year. Part of Kennedy’s MacArthur award was given to the institution of his choice, in this case the University at Albany. The University made a commitment to match Kennedy’s funds and in 1984 Governor Mario Cuomo signed into law legislation creating the New York State Writers Institute, which was to bring in some 1,200 writers (like Toni Morrison and Saul Bellow) to read, lecture, and teach students and the general public at no cost. Kennedy would later go on to write five more books in the Albany Cycle: Quinn’s Book (1988), Very Old Bones (1992), The Flaming Corsage (1996), Roscoe (2002) and Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (2012).
Then Kennedy was given the chance to scripts after Ironweed was made into a major Hollywood film starring Jack Nicholson (who noted of Kennedy “That man can drink”) and Meryl Streep. Kennedy then worked with Francis Ford Coppola and lectured in creative writing and journalism from 1974 to 1982 at the University at Albany, becoming a full professor in 1983. He taught writing as a visiting professor at Cornell University between 1982–1983. He has also wrote plays and screenplays, and co-authored two children’s books with his son, Brendan Kennedy.
Sadly, Kennedy’s wife passed away in 2023. As of the time I am writing this review, William Kennedy is alive (age 97). In addition to the aforementioned, he has received numerous accolades –including election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1993, followed by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. He received the first Eugene O’Neill Lifetime Achievement Award, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Award, and was named a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, PEN, and the Writers Guild of America.
Film Adaptations
- Ironweed (1987)
- Director: Héctor Babenco
- Starring: Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep
- Note: William Kennedy wrote the screenplay. It was mostly shot on location in Albany, NY. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Actor (Nicholson) and Best Actress (for Streep).
Further Reading
- Books in the Albany Cycle:
- Legs (1975)
- Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978)
- Ironweed (1983)
- Quinn’s Book (1988)
- Very Old Bones (1992)
- The Flaming Corsage (1996)
- Roscoe (2002)
- Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (2012)
Literary Context 1983-1984
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1983): awarded to British author William Golding (1911–1993) “for his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today.”
- National Book Award Winner (1983): The Color Purple by Alice Walker (hardcover) and The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty (paperback).
- Note: I have decided to list the prior year National Book Award Winners since this was the final year the National Book Award divided out their winners between separate hardcover and paperback categories which occurred during a brief period from 1980-1983 (this was during a short period when the National Book Award calendar lined up with the Pulitzer Prize, both distributing their awards the following year after the eligibility period). This is why The Color Purple won the National Book Award (hardcover) in 1983 as well as the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. Going forward, post-1984, the National Book Awards have been presented in the fall, usually November, for books published roughly during the calendar year (December of the previous year through November). The Booker Prize made a similar change in 1971.
- Booker Prize Winner (1983): Life & Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1983 was the novelization for the film Return of the Jedi by James Kahn. Other notable works on the list included Poland by James A. Michener, Pet Sematary by Stephen King, The Little Drummer Girl by John le Carré, Christine by Stephen King, and The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.
- In 1983, Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor became the first black African writer elected to the Académie française.
- Russian samizdat poet Irina Ratushinskaya was imprisoned in a gulag for dissident activity. While there she continued to write poetry clandestinely
- Bruce Bethke’s short story “Cyberpunk” was published in Amazing Stories magazine, giving the name to the science fiction subgenre of cyberpunk.
- The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley was published.
- Shakespeare’s Memory, a short story collection by Jorge Luis Borges was published.
- The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov was published.
- Worstward Ho by Samuel Beckett was published.
- Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee was published.
- Icebreaker by John Gardner was published.
- The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis was published.
- Shame by Salman Rushdie was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
An under-appreciated Pulitzer Prize-winner in my view, William Kennedy’s Ironweed is a haunting, ghostly, contemplative story of anguish and guilt. It returns readers to the world of John Steinbeck –the Depression era underclass. I was impressed with this novel, it struck me as a wonderful selection for the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. Maybe someday I will read the rest of the Albany Cycle.
Kennedy, William. Ironweed. Penguin Books, New York, NY, 1983. This book was dedicated “to four good men: Bill Segarra, Tom Smith, Harry Staley, and Frank Trippett.”