Studs Lonigan and the Search for an American Tragedy

James T. Farrell was born in 1904 in Chicago, a city which has produced such characteristic American writers as Carl Sandburg, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Meyer Levin and Nelson Algren. Like several of his fellow–citizens he has become known, not altogether unjustly, as a ‘one-book writer’. But if there is Justice in the label which has thus been applied to Farrell his ‘one book’ has been less fairly treated and has suffered in reverse much the same wrong-headed fate as that which has over-taken some of the typical English novels of the last decade. While certain novels like John Braine's Room at the Top have been absurdly over-praised because apparent virtues of ‘realism’ and ‘toughness’ have obscured even more apparent literary shortcomings, Studs Lonigan has been under-praised because an extreme aversion to Farrell's undeniable ‘realism’ and ‘toughness’ has resulted in his equally undeniable literary merits being obscured. Studs Lonigan is not a novel to which can be applied R. P. Blackmur's phrase: “one of those books in which everything is undertaken with seriousness except the writing”.