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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."
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Introduction
