James T. Farrell

American · 1904 to 1979

Born James Thomas Farrell on February 27, 1904, in Chicago, Illinois, to an Irish-American teamster and a mother who worked as a domestic servant, Farrell grew up inside the very world he would later chronicle. The family was large and poor, and when Farrell was three his parents sent him to live with his maternal grandparents, whose modest comfort spared him some of the hardship his siblings knew; one brother died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. He attended Mt. Carmel High School on Chicago's South Side and went on to the University of Chicago, where, at twenty-one, he began writing fiction that drew directly on the streets, poolrooms, and parish life of his own South Side neighborhood. His first novel, Young Lonigan, appeared in 1932 and grew into the Studs Lonigan trilogy with The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934) and Judgment Day (1935), a portrait of Irish Catholic working-class Chicago so unsparing that critics still rank it among the landmark achievements of American naturalism; the Modern Library later placed the trilogy twenty-ninth on its list of the century's hundred best novels. Farrell went on to write the five-novel Danny O'Neill sequence, the Bernard Carr trilogy, and dozens more novels and story collections, publishing steadily for half a century. He was married three times, twice to the actress Hortense Alden, with whom he had two sons, and once more to Dorothy Farrell, who remained legally his wife, though separated, until his death. His politics moved with equal restlessness, from Trotskyism through the Socialist Party to, by the 1970s, the anti-Communist Committee on the Present Danger. He died at his home in Manhattan on August 22, 1979, at seventy-five, and was buried at Calvary Cemetery in Evanston, Illinois, not far from the streets that had made him a novelist.