The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed explores an era of American innocene and corruption in the first novel in his Albany cycle.
“The best novel about a criminal legend I've ever read.”—Hunter S. Thompson
True to both life and legend,
Legs brilliantly evokes the flamboyant career of gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond. Through the equivocal eyes of Diamond’s attorney, Marcus Gorman (who scraps a promising political career for the more elemental excitement of the criminal underworld), we watch as Legs and his showgirl mistress, Kiki Roberts, blaze their gaudy trail across the tabloid pages of the 1920s and 1930s.
William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle of novels reflect what he once described as the fusion of his imagination with a single place. A native and longtime resident of Albany, New York, his work moves from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, chronicling family life, the city’s netherworld, and its spheres of power—financial, ethnic, political—often among the Irish-Americans who dominated the city in this period. The novels in his cycle include,
Legs,
Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game,
Ironweed,
Quinn’s Book,
Very Old Bones,
The Flaming Corsage, and
Roscoe.
Legs, the inaugural book in William Kennedy's acclaimed Albany cycle of novels, brilliantly evokes the flamboyant career of gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond. Through the equivocal eyes of Diamond's attorney, Marcus Gorman (who scraps a promising political career for the more elemental excitement of the criminal underworld), we watch as Legs and his showgirl mistress, Kiki Roberts, blaze their gaudy trail across the tabloid pages of the 1920s and 1930s.
“Dynamite . . .
Legs is what a novel is supposed to be.”
– The Washington Post Book World“The best novel about a criminal legend I’ve ever read.”
– Hunter S. Thompson“A brilliant novel, a truly creative piece of work . . . like any real artist, Kennedy takes what is really a sordid, vulgar reality and turns it into a human tragedy.”
– Mario Puzo 
