Kennedy, Raymond 1934-2008 (Raymond A. Kennedy, Raymond Arthur Kennedy)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born March 3, 1934, in Wilbraham, MA; died of complications from a stroke, February 18, 2008, in New York (some sources cite Brooklyn), NY. Educator, editor, and novelist. Kennedy was a novelist whose fans were intensely loyal, it is said, if somewhat out of the mainstream. His novels were usually set in places like the small towns of western Massachusetts, bleak manufacturing communities where a reader might not expect to find the colorful, rowdy, often comical characters who emerged from My Father's Orchard (1963), for example, or Ride a Cockhorse (1991), which featured the ribald sexual exploits of an otherwise subdued female office worker named Mrs. Fitzgibbons. The settings were familiar places to Kennedy, who came of age in New England during and after World War II. The stories and characters were the products of a highly creative imagination and finely tuned sense of the absurd, according to his most enthusiastic supporters. Kennedy's own life was more circumspect than his novels might lead one to believe. He worked as an encyclopedia editor for various New York City publishers in the 1960s and spent the seventies as a member of the editorial staff of the U.S. Information Agency in Washington, DC. In 1981 he began to teach creative writing at Columbia University, retiring in 2006. Kennedy wrote at least eight novels, including The Flower of the Republic (1983), The Bitterest Age (1994), and The Romance of Eleanor Gray (2003).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, February 26, 2008, sec. 2, p. 11.

New York Times, February 23, 2008, p. B10.