JAMES T(HOMAS) FARRELL (1947-74)

Writer known especially for his detailed fictional explorations of the lower middle class Irish on the South Side of Chicago where he had grown up.

Farrell attempted to present and analyze honestly and painstakingly social groups and what he called social structures in a modified version of early 20th-century Naturalism.

Of the more than 50 volumes of fiction he produced about half were novels; and for his exhaustive analysis of a section of U.S. urban life he required the expanded scope of a linked series of novels.

The work for which he is remembered is the first, a trilogy describing the life of Studs Lonigan in a deteriorating lower middle class Irish section of Chicago (Young Lonigan, 1932; The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, 1934; and Judgment Day, 1935).

The style followed both social and speech idioms with scrupulous consistency and the work revealed the hero´s decline in terms of the decline of the milieu. Subsequently Farrell drew from one of the lesser figures of his trilogy Danny O´Neill for five novels (1936-53); a third gero Bernard Clare (or Carr) was the subject of another trilogy (1946-52). A three-part television series based on the Studs Lonigan books appeared in March 1979.

Of Farrell´s nonfiction A Note on Literary Criticism (1936) is important for its criticism of the Marxist view of literature; Reflections at Fifty (1954) is a volume of reminiscences.

An attempt to discover Farrell´s role in contemporary cultural history is found in Alan M. Wald´s James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years (1978).