Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [10]
The felt humanity of Studs does not insure him a full human existence, and the discrepancy between his capacities and the nourishment he gets is the source of Farrell’s art. At bottom, Farrell was dramatizing not just the constraints, illusions, and injustices of American society, but those of life itself, the “universe of time,” the “cancer” he wrote of in his later years, the seriatim moments that can push people through existence without enriching them, transforming experience into an endurance test. Studs Lonigan is the great, archetypically American chronicle of the endless series of frightened adjustments called living, the confused haphazard sorting of the fragmented hurtful thoughts people wake up and go to sleep with, the hopefulness that grows untended and wild, like grass in the cracks of the sidewalk—the strange persistence that forever seeks its home.
Ann Douglas
SUGGESTED READING
Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Avon Books, 1969.
Branch, Edgar M. Studs Lonigan’s Neighborhood and the Making of James T Farrell. Newton, Mass.: Arts End Books, 1996.
——. James T. Farrell. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971.
Butler, Robert. “Farrell’s Ethnic Neighborhood and Wright’s Urban Ghetto: Two Visions of Chicago’s South Side.” MELUS 18: 1 (1993): 103—111.
——. “Scenic Structure in Farrell’s Studs Lonigan.” Essays in Literature 14: 1 (1987): 93—103.
Carino, Peter A. “Chicago in Studs Lonigan: Neighborhood and Nation.” Mid-America XV, ed. David D. Anderson. East Lansing, Minn.: Midwestern Press, 1988: 72—83.
Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1996.
Drake, St. Clair and Horace R. Clayton. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. 1945; rpt., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Farrell, James T. Father and Son. New York: Vanguard Press, 1940.
——. The League of Frightened Philistines and Other Papers. New York: Vanguard Press, 1945.
Gold, Michael. Jews Without Money. 1930; rpt., New York: Avon Books, 1965.
Howland, Bette. “James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan.” Literary Review 27: I (1983): 22—25.
Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995.
McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America 1929—1941. New York: Times Books, 1983.
North, Joseph, ed. New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties. New York: International Publishers, 1969.
Rideout, Walter B. The Radical Novel in the United States 1900—1954. New York: Hill and Wang, 1956.
Salzman, Jack and Dennis Flynn, eds. Twentieth-Century Literature: James T. Farrell Issue 22:1 (1976).
Salzman, Jack. Years of Protest: A Collection of American Writings of the 1930s. New York: Pegasus, 1967.
Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order 1919—1933. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957.
Silverman, Kaja. “Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity” in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, E. Ann Kaplan, ed. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Wald, Alan M. James T Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years. New York: New York University Press, 1978.
Young Lonigan
East Side, West Side,
All around the town,
The tots sing ring-a-rosie,
London Bridge is falling down.
Boys and girls together,
Me and Mamie O’Rourke,
We tripped the light fantastic
On the sidewalks of New York.
POPULAR SONG.
A literature that cannot be vulgarized is no literature at all and will perish
FRANK NORRIS.
except in the case of some rarely gifted nature there never will be a good man who has not from his childhood been used to play amid things of beauty and make of them a joy and a study.
PLATO, “REPUBLIC”, Jowett translation.
The poignancy of situations that evoke reflection