Ironweed

Ironweed is a 1983 novel by the American writer William Kennedy, and it received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1984. It is the third book in his Albany Cycle and is set during two days at the end of October 1938.

Francis Phelan is a former baseball player who left his family after a death he caused and has spent years as a vagrant. He comes back to Albany to work a job with a friend, and the novel follows him through the streets, a mission and a graveyard, where the people he has known, living and dead, are present to him. Much of the book is his memory of what he did and what it cost.

Kennedy writes the city as a place with a long memory, and the novel's ghosts are an ordinary feature of its streets rather than a supernatural intrusion. It was adapted into a film in 1987, and it is regarded alongside his other Albany novels as the book that made the cycle's reputation.