Word: lonigan
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...early '30s, a somewhat owlish Chicago slum boy named James Thomas Farrell decided to make the U.S. slum-sensitive. He succeeded better than almost anybody but Al Capone. Farrell's Studs Lonigan (TIME, Feb. 19, 1934) became a synonym for the smalltime U.S. tough guy. With dogged earnestness, a lot of firsthand factuality (Farrell was born the son of a Chicago teamster in 1904) and a total lack of humor, Farrell painstakingly traced Studs's dingy career and its social context through three slablike volumes. None of the Studs series was quite as good as Volume...
...want to handle the intellectuals with the same attention to human values as I handled the people Studs Lonigan knew...
With this novel, James T. Farrell, tireless author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy and its sequels, moves from the noisy and redolent cellars of shanty Irish up into the parlor...
Thus brooded young Danny O'Neill, a minor character in Studs Lonigan, James T. Farrell's hard-boiled chronicle of a poolroom slob in South Chicago's vast Shanty-Irish district. Studs Lonigan was really the book Danny O'Neill had in mind, but all its 1,108 pages did not purge his memory of its hates and bitterness. So Danny himself became the subject of two later novels: A World I Never Made (1936), No Star Is Lost (1938). This week appeared a third, Father and Son, bringing the story of Danny O'Neill...
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...