It’s commonplace (and accurate) to observe that William Kennedy has done for Albany what Joyce did for Dublin, Bellow did for Chicago, and what, in different ways, Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County and García Márquez did for Macondo. But it’s not only Albany that comes alive when you’re in the company of the seventy-eight-year-old author of the ongoing Albany cycle (including Legs [1975], Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game [1978], Quinn’s Book [1988], Very Old Bones [1992], The Flaming Corsage [1996], Roscoe [2002], and Ironweed [1983], which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award). The longer you talk with Kennedy, the more you begin to feel as if you’re in conversation with an artist who has somehow gained direct access to all the significant creative projects of the last two hundred years, and then some. In addition to being a world-class novelist, journalist, historian, and screenwriter, he is also, essentially, an anthropologist of art and politics. A typical conversation with Kennedy moves from Hunter S. Thompson to Fidel Castro to Louis Armstrong to Ingmar Bergman to Diane Sawyer to Francis Ford Coppola (with whom he worked on The Cotton Club) and Meryl Streep (who starred in the film version of Ironweed). The subtitle of O Albany!, the stunning work of nonfiction Kennedy published in 1983, describes New York’s capital as a city full of “political wizards, fearless ethnics, spectacular aristocrats, splendid nobodies, and underrated scoundrels.” Kennedy knows that cast of characters personally, and he writes about them better than anyone else.

When Kennedy received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award (also in 1983), he used some of the award money to start a writers program at the University at Albany, SUNY. “It is my longstanding feeling,” Kennedy said at the time, “that literary conversation is the best conversation in the world.” With that feeling in mind, Kennedy has served as founding director of the New York State Writers Institute, which has brought close to a thousand writers to Albany, as well as numerous workshops, film series, and conferences, all free to the public and full of conversation.

This interview took place during two evenings of conversation and dining in early 2006. I had been hoping to lure Kennedy out to bowl while we talked—he’s had a storied career as a bowler, in addition to his better-known career as a writer—but I happily settled for a few games of pool. Kennedy trounced me in game one, then kindly scratched on the eight ball as he was...