Word: lonigan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DIED. James T. Parrell, 75, novelist who wrote the 1930s classic Studs Lonigan trilogy; of a heart attack; in New York City. As a scrappy, street-smart youth on the South Side of Chicago, Farrell acquired a passion for baseball ("my longest and most faithful love") and an equally durable horror of what he called the "spiritual poverty" of the working-class Irish "with their sad history and their great dreams that collided with the facts of American life." After dabbling in Marxism and liberal arts at the University of Chicago, Farrell chose to escape spiritual poverty by writing about...
Understandably, there was a time when Farrell was a lodestar of the non-Communist left. His Studs Lonigan trilogy is a genre classic, a cluttered memoir of graceless Irish poor whose lyricism and potential are crushed in the struggle to survive. H.L. Mencken called their creator "the best living novelist," and Critic Alfred Kazin noted respectfully that "Farrell was the archetypal novelist of the crisis and its inflictions ... all the rawness and distemper of the thirties seem to live in [his] novels...
Olive and Mary Anne seems unlikely to win the author a vast new public. Audiences will be attracted by another, larger project. NBC has plans for a high-budget miniseries based on Studs Lonigan-a kind of Hibernian Roots. The notion of commercial television popularizing an old radical is an irony too strong even for a James T. Farrell character-and just right for this neglected author...
...docu-drama based on Watergater John Dean's Blind Ambition. Event-loving NBC plans almost as many of these high-budget miniseries as its network rivals combined. Among them: 79 Park Avenue by Harold Robbins, Arthur Hailey's Wheels, James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan, plus a biography of Martin Luther King...
...early days provided Terkel with plenty to find. He grew up in the city that produced the fictional Studs Lonigan and Augie March and the real Al Capone. His mother owned a boardinghouse and later leased a hotel near the Loop. Its lobby was a stage set filled with bit players of the '20s: drifters, grifters, autodidacts, a few nuts and bolts from the political machine. Some of the guests, Terkel remembers, "favored me with little nickel blue books: writings of Eugene V. Debs, Clarence Darrow, Thomas Paine, Bob Ingersoll, Upton Sinclair, Voltaire." Young Terkel was ripe for this...