Farrell, James T[homas] (1904–79), Chicago novelist in the naturalist tradition, studied at the University of Chicago, and held several jobs as clerk, salesman, and newspaper reporter. His experiences as a baseball enthusiast and pupil of Catholic schools on the city's South Side are the basis of
Young Lonigan (1932). This naturalistic stream‐of‐consciousness study of an adolescent in a squalid urban environment shows Farrell's chief influences to be Dreiser, Joyce, and Proust, but also exhibits his interest in the common facts of U.S. life, and his indignation at social and economic inequalities.
Gas‐House McGinty (1933) depicts the activities of employees in a city express office, but
The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934) follows the hero through his moral disintegration as the result of contact with the Chicago underworld, and
Judgment Day (1935), completing the trilogy, tells of his defeat and death.
A new series of novels telling the story of Danny O'Neill, a sensitive youth with a background like Lonigan's, includes
A World I Never Made⧫ (1936),
No Star Is Lost (1938),
Father and Son (1940),
My Days of Anger (1943), and
The Face of Time (1953). Other novels are
Tommy Gallagher's Crusade (1939), about a boy who joins a priest's anti‐Semitic campaign;
Ellen Rogers (1941), about a selfish, middle‐class girl;
Bernard Clare (1946), about a frustrated New York author in the late 1920s, and its sequels,
The Road Between (1949) and
Yet Other Waters (1952);
This Man and This Woman (1951), about the breakup of a long marriage.
The Silence of History (1963) begins a tetralogy about Eddie Ryan, a University of Chicago student in 1926, who loses his faith in Catholicism and searches to find his own way, continued in
What Time Collects (1964), about an unhappy marriage;
Lonely for the Future (1966); and
When Time Was Born (1967). Later novels include
Boarding House Blues (1961);
New Year's Eve, 1929 (1967);
Childhood Is Not Forever (1969);
Invisible Swords (1971), depicting the relationship of a New York publisher and his wife upon discovering their child is retarded;
A Brand New Life (1972);
The Dunne Family (1976), about the lives and fates of a Chicago Irish family; and
The Death of Nora Ryan (1978). His many stories, similar in attitude and subject to the longer fiction, are collected in
Calico Shoes (1934),
Guillotine Party (1935),
Can All This Grandeur Perish? (1937),
$1,000 a Week (1942),
To Whom It May Concern (1944),
When Boyhood Dreams Come True (1946),
The Life Adventurous (1947),
An American Dream Girl (1950),
French Girls Are Vicious (1956),
A Dangerous Woman (1957),
Side Street (1961),
Sound of the City (1962), and
Judith (1974), portraits of aging people, presumably based on actual friends.
Farrell's literary credo is set forth in
A Note on Literary Criticism (1936), describing his views as Marxist but not of the usual “crass and oversimplified” sort;
The League of Frightened Philistines (1945), defending the social value of naturalistic realism;
Literature and Morality (1947); and
Reflections at Fifty (1954). Other writings include
My Baseball Diary (1957), reflections on his love of the national pastime;
It Has Come To Pass (1958), about a visit to Israel;
Collected Poems (1965); and
On Irish Themes (1982).
