James T. Farrell

James Thomas Farrell (February 27, 1904 - August 22, 1979) was an American novelist.

Farrell was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a large Irish-American family which included siblings Earl, Joseph, Helen, John, and Mary. In addition, there were several other siblings who died in childbirth, as well as one who died from the influenza epidemic in 1917. Farrell attended Mt. Carmel High School ,then known as St. Cyril, with future Egyptologist Richard Anthony Parker. He then later attended the University of Chicago. He began writing when he was 21 years old. A novelist, journalist, and short story writer known for his realistic portraits of the working class South Side Irish, James T. Farrell based his writing on his own experiences. He tried to show how peoples' destinies are shaped by the era and the environment in which they live. One of his most famous works was the "Studs Lonigan" trilogy, which was made into a film in 1960 and later into a television miniseries in 1979. The trilogy was voted number 29 on the Modern Library's list of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.

Paralleling the Lonigan saga, a story of a working class Chicago youth of Irish ancestry which ends tragically, is the saga of Danny O’Neill, a youth of similar background who moves toward a literary career that will perhaps resemble O’Neill’s (e.g., the powerful, Lonigan-linked “No Star is Lost") and the saga of Bernard Carr, a Left wing literary intellectual like O’Neill, moving through the politically tumultuous 2nd quarter of the twentieth century.

An interesting sidebar, as reported in the New York Times on the occasion of Norman Mailer's death in 2007, was the inspiration Farrell provided to Mailer.

"Mr. Mailer intended to major in aeronautical engineering, but by the time he was a sophomore, he had fallen in love with literature. He spent the summer reading and rereading James T. Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan,” John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” and John Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.,” and he began, or so he claimed, to set himself a daily quota of 3,000 words of his own, on the theory that this was the way to get bad writing out of his system. By 1941 he was sufficiently purged to win the Storymagazine prize for best short story written by an undergraduate."

In February, 2004 on the 100th anniversary of Farrel's birth, Mailer was on a panel at the New York Library commemorating Farrell. "James T. Farrell Centenary Celebration, February 25, 2004 with Ann Douglas, Pete Hamill, Norman Mailer, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Kevin McCarthy, and moderator Donald Yannella discuss the life and legacy of the author of the Studs Lonigan Trilogy". At this event Mailer said how Farrell's writing had changed Mailer's direction in life.

Farrell was an avid baseball fan and well versed in the statistics of the game. During one lecture tour in about 1950, where he lectured at several universities in Missouri and Colorado, he was as apt to tell baseball tales as he was to talk about his fictional works. On this tour Farrell was accompanied by his young son Kevin, later Dr. Kevin J. Farrell; his sister, Mary Farrell Holland; and his nephew, Sean F. Holland.

Farrell was also active in Trotskyist politics and joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). He came to agree with Albert Goldman and Felix Morrows' criticism of the SWP and Fourth International leaderships. With Goldman, he left the group in 1946 to join the Workers' Party.

Within the Workers' Party, Goldman and Farrell worked closely. In 1948, they developed criticisms of its policies, claiming that the party should support the Marshall Plan and also Norman Thomas' presidential candidacy. Having come to believe that only capitalism could defeat Stalinism, they left to join the Socialist Party of America. In the late 1960's, disenchanted with the political "center", while impressed with the SWP's involvement in the Civil Rights and US Anti-Vietnam War movements, he reestablished contact with his former comrades of two decades earlier. He attended one of more SWP-sponsored Militant Forum events (probably in NYC), but never rejoined the Trotskyist movement.

Bibliography

*"Young Lonigan" (1932)
*"Gas-House McGinty" (1933)
*"Calico Shoes" (1934)
*"The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan" (1934)
*"Guillotine Party and Other Stories" (1935)
*"Judgment Day" (1935)
*"A Note on Literary Criticism" (1936)
*"A World I Never Made" (1936)
*"Can All This Grandeur Perish? and Other Stories" (1937)
*"No Star Is Lost" (1938)
*"Tommy Gallagher's Crusade" (1939)
*"Father and Son" (1940)
*"Decision" (1941)
*"Ellen Rogers" (1941)
*"My Days of Anger" (1943)
*"Bernard Clare" (1946)
*"Literature and Morality" (1947)
*"The Road Between" (1949)
*"An American Dream Girl" (1950)
*"The Name Is Fogarty: Private Papers on Public Matters" (1950)
*"This Man and This Woman" (1951)
*"Yet Other Waters" (1952)
*"The Face of Time" (1953)
*"Reflections at Fifty and Other Essays" (1954)
*"French Girls Are Vicious and Other Stories" (1955)
*"A Dangerous Woman and Other Stories" (1957)
*"My Baseball Diary" (1957)
*"It Has Come To Pass" (1958)
*"Boarding House Blues" (1961)
*"Side Street and Other Stories" (1961)
*"The Silence of History" (1963)
*"What Time Collects" (1964)
*A Glass of Milk, in "Why Work Series" editor Gordon Lish (1966)
*"Lonely for the Future" (1966)
*"When Time Was Born" (1966)
*"New Years Eve/1929" (1967)
*"A Brand New Life" (1968)
*"Childhood Is Not Forever" (1969)
*"Invisible Swords" (1971)
*"Judith and Other Stories" (1973)
*"The Dunne Family" (1976)
*"Olive and Mary Anne" (1977)
*"The Death of Nora Ryan" (1978)

Posthumous editions

*"Eight Short, Short Stories" (1981)
*"Sam Holman" (1994)
*"Hearing Out James T. Farrell: Selected Lectures" (1997)
*"Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy", ed. Pete Hamill (New York: [http://www.loa.org The Library of America] , 2004) ISBN 978-1-93108255-6.
*"Dreaming Baseball", eds. Ron Briley, Margaret Davidson, and James Barbour (Kent OH: [http://upress.kent.edu/books/Farrell_J.htm Kent State University Press] , 2007).

References

External links

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