An Honest Writer

James T Farrell vaulted into the American literary firmament during the 1930s, becoming one of its brightest lights. "Studs Lonigan", his trilogy about a young Irish 'tough' from Chicago's South Side, became a literary sensation and was acclaimed as a modern classic. Farrell went on to write some other excellent novels, and kept on writing for four more decades. But his courageous stance against Stalinism took a toll on his literary reputation, and later, as the naturalism he employed in his best fiction slipped out of vogue, his work fell into neglect and his star dimmed. Even 'Studs Lonigan' came in recent decades to be little read. This book recreates Farrell's life and times and restores this important writer to his rightful place in the forefront of American literature. Robert Landers begins this landmark biography with Farrell's great subject: the vibrant Chicago of his birth and boyhood, the struggling Irish-Americans and others on the city's South Side, and his own family, whose eccentric members inspired some of the most memorable figures in his fiction. If the theme of Farrell's contemporary, Thomas Wolfe, was that "you can't go home again," the theme of his own work was that you never really leave. In Farrell's half-century as a writer, Chicago would remain as much a mythic landscape for him, a place standing for the whole of the American experience, as Yoknapatawpha County was for William Faulkner. With a deep sympathy for Farrell and an informed reading of the larger context in which he lived and worked, Robert Landers has produced a sparkling history of an era and a compelling portrait of one of its major figures. This authoritative biography arrives right on time for the James T Farrell centenary in 2004.

Robert K. Landers is a senior editor at the Wilson Quarterly. He has worked as a reporter or editor at the Providence Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New Haven Journal-Courier and the Register of Torrington, Connecticut. He lives with his wife, Susan, in Arlington, Virginia