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man who had participated in the Chicago teamster strike of 1914.) He felt rejected by both parents for separating him from his brothers and sisters; and he came to hate his eldest brother, Earl, for being his father’s favorite as well as for teasing him. He learned his scorching lingo from both sides of a family that had raised cursing to a communicative art. When his father died in 1924, Farrell’s mother, still relatively young, took to religion with greater intensity. In Studs Lonigan Mrs. Reilley bears some resemblance to her, and Farrell probably blended her and his grandmother, the illiterate Julia Brown Daly, a well-known character in the neighborhood, to give us Mrs. Lonigan.

The South Fifties where his grandmother lived—the locale of the trilogy—was no less hateful to Farrell in his youth than the “shanty Irish” block where his parents froze in wintertime in their heatless cottage. In The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan Farrell has Danny O’Neill, now a university student, think: “Some day, he would drive this neighborhood and all his memories of it out of his consciousness with a book.” Farrell does not deny that, for all the boys he knew and tried to flock with, he remained a tormented lone wolf, as is reflected in the treatment accorded Danny by Studs and the gang. Nor does he deny that growing up as he did was sometimes a battle of guts and nerves, developing a high tension in a person. The battleground is dramatized in Young Lonigan and The Young Manhood.

Sociologists call such neighborhoods as Farrell’s “urban interstitial” areas, residential districts going to pot. In The Young Manhood Farrell demonstrates this disintegration by depicting young men of social backgrounds different from Studs’, less stable persons who are transients in boardinghouses and beginning to haunt the poolroom. He shoals further neighborhood decay as the older youths are seen going off to be killed in a “war to end all wars,” and the Negro overflow of racial barriers causes the 1919 race riot.

It is no wonder that Farrell wanted to emulate Balzac, Zola, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser, with their juxtaposition of classes and their concept of power; and that in college he took avidly to Joyce’s dissection of Irish life. For one thing, out of the emotional bondage of his formative years came his awareness of money as a shaping factor in human lives, along with the motifs of time and death that underlie and give tragic dignity to the frustrated and culturally pulverized people characterized in his trilogy. For another, his pent-up sexual yearnings in his teens, plus his callowness with girls, who would not give him a second date, reinforced his drive for recognition.

Although H. L. Mencken had crusaded to gain Dreiser and others freedom of expression on all topics, American literature was still genteel in its language and treatment of sex until Farrell anatomized the sexual behavior of the lower and middle-class Irish in his trilogy. His scarifying account of American teen-age sex life in the big city only now is being fully accredited. As late as 1948, according to Farrell’s letter, dated May 22 of that year, to Victor Weybright of The New American Library, witnesses against the trilogy included: “Fundamentalist ministers, a burglar alarm salesman, and a priest from Cardinal Daugherty’s office, saying that he was a personal representative of the Cardinal, and that he found the book filthy.” An Irish Catholic named Ryan, as attorney for the Philadelphia police, defended their attempted ban by quoting isolated passages from Studs Lonigan that would of course have made anyone blanch at the time. Farrell’s impromptu reply to the lawyer at one point was admirable: when young he believed that “all of these feelings and problems” about sex “were only mine. I felt totally isolated. I did not realize that many boys felt the same way.” He unsparingly investigated the sex life of the gang in his trilogy to “tell youth that the problems and even the shames, and the humiliations, and the difficulties you go through, are things worthy of the serious