William Kennedy

Kennedy worked for years as a journalist in Albany and San Juan, Puerto Rico (where he edited a newspaper alongside a young Hunter S. Thompson) before Saul Bellow, whom he'd studied under, urged him to keep writing fiction despite repeated rejections.

Ironweed, the third novel in his Albany Cycle, was rejected by thirteen publishers before Bellow's advocacy got it printed; it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and was adapted into a film starring Jack Nicholson. He used a MacArthur Fellowship to help found the New York State Writers Institute at SUNY Albany.

He has continued the Albany Cycle across more than half a dozen novels, remaining, well into his nineties, his city's most devoted chronicler.