"What James Joyce did for Dublin and Saul Bellow did for Chicago, William Kennedy has done for Albany," said John Atlas in Vogue. Playwright, screenwriter, and celebrated author of the Albany Cycle novels, Kennedy began his writing career as a journalist, giving him an intimate view of his hometown. He rose to national renown with his 1983 masterpiece Ironweed, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He also developed the screenplays for the film adaptation of Ironweed, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, and Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club. In Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, Kennedy follows heroic journalist David Quinn from the nightclubs and jungles of revolutionary Cuba to the drug-running gangsters and crooked politicians in racially charged 1960s Albany.

University of Pennsylvania professor Paul Hendrickson's 2003 book Sons of Mississippi, a study of the legacy of racism in the families of seven Mississippi sheriffs during the 1960s, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in general nonfiction. As a feature writer at the Washington Post for more than 20 years, Hendrickson was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize six times. His previous books include Seminary; Looking for the Light—a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Living and the Dead—a finalist for the National Book Award. In Hemingway's Boat, he focuses on the years 1934 to 1961--from Hemingway's pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide--charting the writer's highs and lows around this one constant during his time: his beloved boat, Pilar.