WHEN BIG NAMES collide, the Nicholsons, Hoffmans, Beattys, Streeps and DeNiros, you get "Falling in Love," you get "Ishtar," you get "Heartburn." Godzilla (represented by International Creative Management) meets Godzilla (represented by International Creative Management). Together, they Act - crushing the tiny Tokyo-of-a-film below...

"Ironweed," the new film by Hector Babenco starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, comes about as close to being an unmitigated waste of talent as any movie in recent memory. The film, which is taken from William Kennedy's adaptation of his own Pulitzer...

Back rooms and saloons where William Kennedy's characters prowled are stops on a trolley tour. The local orchestra is tuning up for a concerto based on his latest work. And residents around this city so intimately tied to the Pulitzer Prize winner's imagination are being...

Norman Mailer, the pugnacious prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur with such books as "The Naked and the Dead" and "The Executioner's Song," has died at the age of 84.Mailer died Saturday of acute renal failure...

In the following essay, Taylor locates the importance of alcohol as part of the mythic structure of William Kennedy's novel Ironweed.

"Ironweed"—which refers to a tough-stemmed member of the sunflower family—recounts a few days in the life of an Albany skid-row bum, a former major-league third baseman with a talent for running, particularly running away, although his ambition now, at the height of the Depression, has been scaled down to the task of getting through the next 20 minutes or so. The novel is rich in plot and dramatic tension, building as it eventually does, to a violent showdown between a gang of ma...

[William Kennedy, a] lifelong resident of Albany, has shown again how certain talents flourish best in native soil. Ironweed dovetails with its predecessor. The scene is still Albany, the time still 1938. It is Halloween, and Billy Phelan's father Francis is back in his old haunts, meeting ghosts and goblins from his scary past. Francis is a bum and a lush….