Raymond Kennedy, who died Monday at 73, was an author of prodigious talents whose work enchanted reviewers while somehow eluding the mass market.

He was “the kind of novelist who gets high praise in sophisticated places and remains relatively unknown,” wrote Anatole Broyard, in a 1983 review of “Flower of the Republic,” Kennedy’s picaresque and profane short novel about the romance between a professor and an enormous lady exterminator. His fiction garnered positive reviews from heavy hitters including Raymond Carver (“a master story teller”) and Lionel Trilling (“so much energy and vivacity of spirit!”).

Kennedy was born March 3, 1934, in Wilbraham, Mass., and grew up in Belchertown and Holyoke. The western Massachusetts countryside and its hardscrabble mill towns would form the backdrops of many of his stories long after he moved to New York.

After serving in the army, he studied english at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he worked with the poet Ted Hughes, then a visiting professor. He went on to work for Collier’s Encyclopedia and then Encyclopedia Americana, where he was the anthropology editor. His first novel, “My Father’s Orchard,” appeared in 1963, but he first attracted critical notice with his second, “Goodnight Jupiter” (1970). He began a long association with Gordon Lish in the early 1970s, after publishing a short story in Esquire, where Mr. Lish was fiction editor.

His other novels include “Columbine” (1980) and “Ride a Cockhorse” (1991), about a middle-age home-loan officer who becomes transfixed with an 18-year-old high school drum major. She considers him “a vision of martial beauty.” “I’d like to change his diapers,” she says, before proceeding to do that and more in a whirlwind that functions as a satire of banking takeovers and scandals of the late 1980s.

A resident of New York for a half-century, Kennedy taught fiction writing at Columbia University for more than two decades, and was known for after-class roundtables at the West End bar. He also taught at New York University and Boston University.

According to Boston Globe critic Katherine Powers, a Kennedy booster and also a friend, Kennedy’s relative obscurity was in part due to bad luck.

“His publishing history has been a series of dropped balls,” Ms. Powers wrote in 2000. “Publishers folding, publicists vamoosing, reviews not running — kisses of death so familiar to the mid-list author but in his case, it’s been a real smoocharama. Still, he seems buoyant.”

Still in print are “Ride a Cockhorse” and “The Romance of Eleanor Gray” (2003).

Kennedy’s wife, Gloria, died in 2002. He is survived by a daughter, Branwynne Kennedy.