Word: lonigan
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Compared with the tough kids of contemporary fiction, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer were cherubs. But the contrast is more apparent than real; portrayed with James Farrell's pimpled candor, Huck Finn would undoubtedly be just as taboo for adolescent libraries as Studs Lonigan. Well aware of this fact are grownups who grew up in Midwest small towns. But few of them have admitted as much in print...
...have been as carefully described as the narrow rectangle of Chicago streets that lies between 25th and 71st Streets, between Wabash and Stony Island Avenues. Born there 34 years ago, James Thomas Farrell has made it the scene of five long novels, including his 1,108-page trilogy, Studs Lonigan, has harped steadily on the fights and brawls that have raged on its vacant lots, in its schoolyards and alleys, in its schoolrooms, poolrooms, bedrooms and parlors...
...unblinking realism of Farrell's pictures of lower-class life made critics overlook their monotony, their repetitions, and the fact that all the characters seemed to divide their time between languid day dreaming and fierce battling with other dreamers. When he finished his Studs Lonigan trilogy three years ago, admirers hoped he might get away from 71st Street and its overly pugnacious inhabitants. But when he began another and longer series of novels laid in the same neighborhood, with characters akin to the Lonigans, but poorer and more quarrelsome, it seemed that James Farrell was obsessed with the dreariness...
...THIS GRANDEUR PERISH?- James T. Farrell-Vanguard ($2.50). Seventeen satirical, sad, sexy, saprophytic stories by the author of the hard-boiled Studs Lonigan trilogy...
...page length. Last week Meyer Levin's The Old Bunch (964 pages) gave wrist-weary readers another hefty handful. Aside from actual weight, however, The Old Bunch has less in common with its swollen sisters than with such half-starved gutter rats as James Farrell's Studs Lonigan. Realism of the cheapest dye, Author Levin's tale of Jews in Chicago is not so much a chronicle as chronic narrative. Gentile readers (goyische Lezer to Author Levin) may find themselves oppressed at times by the heavy, strident Jewishness of the book's atmosphere, but once under...