Studs Lonigan trilogy by James T. Farrell

Author James T. Farrell

Identification Series of novels about the moral, social, and personal turmoil a young man faces while growing up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in South Side Chicago from 1916 through 1931

Dates Published in 1932, 1934, and 1935

While growing up, both author James T. Farrell and his most famous fictional character, Studs Lonigan, witnessed the rise and decline of the United States from victory in World War I and the Roaring Twenties to Prohibition and the Great Depression. To those living in the 1930’s wondering what had gone wrong with American society, Farrell’s trilogy offered a detailed and cogent explanation.

The three books of the Studs Lonigan trilogy—Young Lonigan (1932), The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), and Judgment Day (1935)—cover a young man’s life from the ages of fourteen to twenty-nine, during the years leading up to 1931. The trilogy takes place mostly within a restricted location within Chicago: State Street and Washington Park on the west and east and Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth Streets to the north and south form the borders of Studs’s life. Farrell uses this specificity to show that the extent of Studs’s existence is limited physically, spiritually, and intellectually. Studs is boxed in mainly as the result of his prejudices and skepticism about race and intellect. These beliefs were passed down to him; those who were supposed to raise him crippled him with their values. The parameters of his life broaden slightly in Judgment Day, but only because the consequences of his negative belief system have finally spun out of control as he reaches adulthood. Clearly, the story is not just about Studs Lonigan. The trilogy is a morality tale for a generation of Americans who became adults in the 1930’s. Farrell stresses that spiritual impoverishment is the major obstacle to overcome for middle- and lower-class Americans living in the 1930’s.

Although these novels gained serious attention from book critics of the 1930’s, Farrell’s style and graphic content were difficult to accept. Many critics dismissed Farrell’s work as good sociology but not good art. The implication was that the characters and the realistic details were remarkable, but the language was too common for great literature. Other critics supported Farrell, citing that his language helped him accurately portray the neighborhood he understood so well. In fact, Farrell could not directly place himself above the characters in the book while giving readers a perspective from the depths of spiritual agony. If he had used a heightened style to impress critics, his perspective toward the characters and their environment would have changed and, thus, destroyed the purpose of what he was trying to show about Studs’s way of life.

Farrell confronts the notion of a moral golden age of the past as well as the idea that immorality is the fault of the unemployed and bohemians. Farrell shoots holes in those sentiments by showing that the working middle class was just as derelict, in terms of morality, as any group. The adults in the novels, the parents of those who came into adulthood in the 1930’s, refuse to believe anything is wrong with their lives or their children. They think societal problems are rooted in the way others live. This is best exemplified in the final pages of Judgment Day. When Studs is dying, his infuriated mother blames Studs’s wife, Catherine, for his impending death. Mrs. Lonigan demoralizes the bearer of Studs’s child and jeopardizes the child’s future, while ignoring the consequences of Studs’s immorality. She blames what is in front of her instead of taking a deep look at the past. Farrell offers a look inside this time period in American life, seeking thorough and honest understanding, and he was criticized for it.

Impact

Farrell scrutinized the cyclical nature of self-defeat for the benefit of generations to come. The first- and second-generation European immigrants who were the adult characters in the series had a moment in time, before the Great Depression, when they did not have to struggle to find a meal every day. They might have been the first in their families to have that window of comfort. However, according to Farrell’s depiction, many were not able to provide their children with the love of art, music, books, science, religion, nature, and humanity needed to have a higher quality of life in the United States. This theme, along with Farrell’s style and content, makes the trilogy one of the quintessential modernist works of literature of the 1930’s.

Bibliography

Branch, Edgar M. James T. Farrell. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Studs Lonigan’s Neighborhood and the Making of James T. Farrell. Newton, Mass.: Arts End Books, 1996.

Landers, Robert K. An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004.

Pizer, Donald. “James T. Farrell and the 1930’s.” In Literature at the Barricades: The American Writer in the 1930’s, edited by Ralph F. Bogardus and Fred Hobson. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982.