Ironweed
William Kennedy
Paperback
(Quality Paperbacks, Aug. 16, 1987)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany in a hurry after killing a scab during a trolley workers' strike; he ran away again after accidentally - and fatally - dropping his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and the present.... New York Times: "Rich in plot and dramatic tension... almost Joycean in its variety of rhetoric... the novel goes straight for the throat and the funnybone." Wall Street Journal: "[Kennedy's] power is such that the reader will follow him almost anywhere, to the edge of tragedy and back again to redemption."