Farrell, James T[homas]
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.
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