Tommy Gallagher's Crusade.
James T. Farrell.
New York: The Vanguard Press, 1939.

The most grimly naturalistic of the radical novelists was James T. Farrell (1904-1979), who, born in Chicago and educated in parochial schools on the South Side, depicted with enormous and telling detail in the Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932-35) the sordid world of those not fortunate enough to escape the depressing mindless milieu of his own boyhood. This was followed by the Bernard Clare trilogy and a series devoted to Danny O'Neill--a large body of serious work by a writer of high social and political acumen. Tommy Gallagher's Crusade (1939), terse and caustic, is a distillation of Farrell's gifts of observation: the title character is an unemployed ignorant youth, pathetic in his stifled lusts, who tries to find compensation for his feelings of guilt and uselessness by enlisting in the anti-Semitic movement of Father Moylan (a thinly veiled portrait of Charles Coughlin).

Farrell has written, "If there is any hatred in my books, it is not directed against people but against conditions which brutalize human beings and produce spiritual and material poverty."