Studs Lonigan

by James T. Farrell, Anne Douglas (Introduction)

Overview

Collected here in one volume is James T. Farrell's renowned trilogy of the youth, early manhood, and death of Studs Lonigan: Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day. In this relentlessly naturalistic portrait, Studs starts out his life full of vigor and ambition, qualities that are crushed by the Chicago youth's limited social and economic environment. Studs's swaggering and vicious comrades, his narrow family, and his educational and religious background lead him to a life of futile dissipation. Ann Douglas provides an illuminating introductory essay to Farrell's masterpiece, one of the greatest novels of American literature.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101503164
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/01/2001
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	896
Sales rank:	400,817
File size:	826 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

James Thomas Farrell (1904—1979) was born in Chicago to a struggling family of second-generation Irish Catholic immi grants. In 1907, his father, James Farrell, a teamster unable to support his growing family, placed young Jim with his maternal grandparents. It was his grandparents’ neighborhood in Chicago’s South Fifties that would provide the background to Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy. Farrell worked his way through the University of Chicago, shedding his Catholic upbringing and absorbing the works of William James, John Dewey, Sigmund Freud, while reading widely in American and European literature: Herman Melville, Sherwood Anderson, H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and James Joyce were critical influences on his literary development. “Slob” (1929), his first published story, was also his first render ing of the real life “Studs Lonigan,” a young man he had known growing up in Chicago. Farrell’s first novel, Young Lonigan was published in 1932, followed by The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934) and Judgment Day (1935)—the three volumes making up his celebrated Studs Lonigan trilogy. A prolific writer, Farrell left more than fifty books of stories and novels behind him when he died in 1979. Alongside his masterpiece Studs Lonigan, Farrell’s best-known works include the Danny O’Neill novels, A World I Never Made, No Star is Lost, Father and Son, and My Days of Anger. James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy is also available in Penguin Classics.

 

Ann Douglas teaches English at Columbia University. Her books include Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s and The Feminization of American Culture.

Table of Contents

Studs LoniganIntroduction by Ann Douglas

STUDS LONIGAN: A TRILOGY
Young Lonigan
The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan
Judgment Day

Epilogue by James T. Farrell

What People are Saying About This

Alan Wald

A masterwork of the Depression years, the Studs Lonigan Trilogy is a stunning artistic achievement that urgently demands reconsideration by the present generation of readers and scholars. The appearance in 1928 of the first volume, Young Lonigan, changed U.S. literature forever in ways that have yet to be fully acknowledged or understood. Farrell, the Proust—toting poet of Chicago's tough Irish South Side, pioneered a unique style that burst asunder the barriers separating "high art" from "mass culture." In the rise and fall of Studs Lonigan Farrell dramatized the hollowness of the "cult of masculinity" and the overall malaise of U.S. social institutions in a manner out distancing by far his more famous contemporaries such as Dos Passos and Steinbeck.
—(Alan Wald, author of James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years)

Norman Mailer

I read Studs Lonigan in my freshman year of Harvard, and it changed my life….I couldn't get over the discovery. I wanted to write.

Editorial Reviews

The single literary conversation of my entire Bronx boyhood was about "the good parts" in Studs Lonigan….One summer I read all of the trilogy from beginning to end and enjoyed the other parts even more than "the good parts."
—New York Times Book Review

Jules Feiffer

A devastating account of the short, tragic life of its protagonist and one the most powerful fictional treatments of the Irish in America.
—Illinois Authors

James Hurt