James Farrell Books

Franklin Library James Farrell books:
Young Lonigan - signed limited edition - 1979

James Farrell biography
James Thomas Farrell (1904-1979), was an American writer, born in Chicago Illinois, and educated at the University of Chicago. Most of Farrell's novels and short stories, drawn in large part from James Farrell's early experience as a youth in Chicago, are a protest again social and economic inequities in American life. The 1935 trilogy Studs Lonigan, his most famous work, is a portrayal of the social and religious aspects of life among the Irish Americans in Chicago. James T. Farrell was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing for the year 1936-1937.

Young Lonigan - Studs Lonigan trilogy book 1
An American classic in the vein of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath , the first book of James T. Farrell's powerful Studs Lonigan trilogy covers five months of the young hero's life in 1916, when he is sixteen years old. In this relentlessly naturalistic yet richly complex portrait, Studs is carried along by his swaggering and shortsighted companions, his narrow family, and his educational and religious background toward a fate that he resists yet cannot escape.

It's a story about coming-of-age and sexual awakening in the mean streets of 1910s Chicago. It's the beginning of a trilogy that will follow Studs Lonigan throughout adolescence. And, claims Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, it reveals "his vision of the truth-the truth about people, the truth about writing, the truth about America."

It's the summer of 1916 in the tough South Side of Chicago, and William "Studs" Lonigan - on the verge of fifteen and wearing his first long trousers - is ready to kick loose. He's leaving behind the jailhouse rigors of St. Patrick's school and embarking on the adventure of his life.

In James T. Farrell's classic novels of Irish life on the South Side of Chicago, Farrell portrays sympathetically and graphically his protagonist's coming of age.