Book Description
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.

With an introduction by Ann Douglas.


About the Author
James T. Farrell, a native of Chicago, was a prolific novelist and prominent social activist.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

'Studs Lonigan, ' the story of an Irish-American youth growing to adulthood in Chicago, is considered by many to be one of the finest American novels from the first half of the twentieth century, and its author was widely regarded as the voice of urban Irish America.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jules Feiffer - New York Times Book Review

The single literary conversation of my entire Bronx boyhood was about "the good parts" in Studs Lonigan￯﾿ﾽ.One summer I read all of the trilogy from beginning to end and enjoyed the other parts even more than "the good parts."

James Hurt - Illinois Authors

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

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

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)