James T. Farrell in an undated photograph. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Did James T. Farrell deserve a Nobel Prize for literature? Many critics today wouldn’t agree, mostly because they don’t much remember him. Farrell’s peers and relatives might not have offered assent, as he was not an easy man to get along with by any account. America’s past editors would certainly say no, as they despised Farrell even when obsessed with him. And book readers might continue to vote with their pocketbooks: Farrell never achieved the great financial success his early career would have suggested.

You know who did think James T. Farrell deserved the Nobel Prize? James T. Farrell.

The Chicago-born chronicler of that city’s back-of-the-yard worlds, who once confessed that “I had vast ambitions and an incurable ego,” was nominated a number of times for the award but always came up short. Perhaps it would come after his death, he mused. (It didn’t.) But no one can deny that Farrell—whom Kurt Vonnegut Jr. once called “the father of us all” and whose admirers ranged from Norman Mailer to Stephen Vincent Benét to Mary McCarthy—created an archetype that perdures to this day: the American Catholic writer.

Some go even further: “Every first-generation American novelist of immigrant parents—Jhumpa Lahiri or Amy Tan or Philip Roth—works in a tradition that flows straight back to Farrell, Henry Roth and a few other sons and daughters of Ellis Island,” David Kipen of The San Francisco Chronicle wrote in 2004. And there is no doubt that many American Catholics who first laid eyes on Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy in the 1930s (including bishops, America editors and censors here and abroad) would disavow his “pornographic” and “obscene” novels entirely. But the Catholic writers who came after him certainly read the famous apostate and Marxist provocateur.

“Like Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and O’Hara, Farrell stopped practicing his own Catholicism, but unlike them he made his experience of the church a focus of his art,” Dennis Flynn wrote in America in 1979. “Dealing mainly with normative and socially significant rather than exotic religious experience, Farrell has written about the presence of the church and the effects of its ordinary, sacramental work in the lives of representative Irish-American Catholics.”

“I can think of no American novelist who begins to approach Farrell in the degree to which his work is rooted in a philosophical world view,” Flynn continued. “He was able to put into fiction many various thoughts and feelings such as those of Catholics, thoughts and feelings many people have had but which had never been held worthy of inclusion in serious literature. It is one of his achievements to have been able to include in his books aspects of reality which others found either too trivial or, perhaps, too embarrassing to put into writing.”

When Farrell’s debut novel, Young Lonigan, came out in 1932, the publisher tried to pitch it as a cautionary tale meant for mental health professionals working with difficult adolescent youths; its protagonist and that of Farrell’s two other books in that trilogy, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan two years later and Judgment Day the year after that, was something American fiction hadn’t quite seen before. Studs Lonigan (and yes, that’s where Studs Terkel got his nom de plume) was foul-mouthed, violent, capricious, living in a world that was all that and more. He was also steeped in the Irish Catholicism of Chicago’s working-class neighborhoods.

The trilogy sold more books and got more attention than anything Farrell would ever write again. It also established him as a leading voice of realism in fiction: “This book is no novel,” said the New York Times review of Young Lonigan. The trilogy also set Farrell up as an enemy of a church that was aghast at his portrayal of human nature and, frankly, of the Catholic Church itself.

Farrell was born in 1904 in Chicago; his parents had 15 children, and he spent much of his childhood with his grandmother because of his family’s slim financial means. He attended the University of Chicago for several years without matriculating, working odd jobs while honing his craft as a writer. The success of the Lonigan trilogy allowed him to devote himself to writing full time after 1932, and the words poured from his pen: essays, poetry, criticism and more or less a novel a year for half a century. He moved to New York and married Dorothy Butler (whom he would divorce but later remarry) and began a second trilogy cycle with many of the same themes and hyper-realistic scenes as the first.

Unfortunately, none of Farrell’s later works ever achieved the financial success or critical acclaim as the Studs Lonigan cycle, something Farrell bitterly resented throughout his life. Farrell, Tom Deignan wrote in a 2004 review of Robert K. Landers’s biography of the writer, “always felt ill-treated by publishers and critics. And in a sense he was. Farrell wrote far too much and was a terrible editor of his own work. But this did not prevent him from openly lobbying for the Nobel prize. In the end, these sins—envy, ambition, troubles with lovers and children—are the sins of many writers.”

Farrell also ran into trouble with censors—twice he was charged with obscenity—and with his politics; a devoted Trotskyite in his younger years, he later fell out with the Stalinists who represented much of Marxist thought in the United States. Farrell (who would move over the course of his life from opposing American intervention in World War II to supporting the war in Vietnam) also disdained the hipsters he found on the American political left. As Deignan noted in his 2004 review, Farrell “believed many fellow radicals, who loudly railed against convention, had simply fallen for a new religion, St. Bohemia.”

Farrell later told the critic Roger Ebert that “The FBI has left me alone, and the Air Force. Everybody else has had a go at me. Congress denounced me, and the Church, and Ireland, and the Third Reich, and South Africa, and Racine, Wisconsin. I have been on every side of everybody simply by moving in a straight line.”

Over the decades, Farrell authored more than 50 works of fiction. Though his reputation suffered over the years and many of his later novels sold poorly, he achieved a sort of posthumous revival at the turn of the century. The Studs Lonigan trilogy was voted No. 29 on the Modern Library’s list of the “100 best novels of the 20th century,” and at a celebration of the centenary of Farrell’s birth in 2004, authors including Norman Mailer, Pete Hamill and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. praised his work.

For American Catholic fiction writers, Farrell created a template both to follow—the bildungsroman set in an urban religious enclave from which one is trying to escape—and to react against. One can still find those phenomena occurring in the works of everyone from Walker Percy and J. F. Powers to Alice McDermott and Mary Gordon. What is Gordon’s Final Payments, after all, but the inversion of the tale of Studs Lonigan? We may not read James T. Farrell anymore, but we can still see his words beneath the surface of much that followed. 

Nor was Farrell’s portrait of the church—his moralizing and out-of-touch priests, his ineffective institution in the face of society’s harsh realities—necessarily always negative. Is it reasonable simply to note that sometimes it was realistic? In Farrell’s fiction, Flynn wrote in 1979, “Catholics like Studs Lonigan are not saved by their own faith or by the faith of the clergy from lives of degradation. On the other hand, Catholic faith is not itself attacked or shown to lack any validity, but is made to appear genuinely, however weakly, against the grain of social tendencies threatening both individuals and the church.”

Farrell died in 1979 in New York City of a heart attack. His obituary in The New York Times included a poetic eulogy for himself he had quoted to Ebert back in 1968, when Ebert had interviewed him shortly before the momentous Democratic National Convention in Farrell’s hometown of Chicago:

James T. (for Thomas) Farrell, Who might have been this,
Or who might have been that,
But who might have been
Neither this nor that,
And who wrote too much, who
Fought too much, and who
Kissed too much,
(He needed no enemies).
That man, J. T. F., died last night
Of a depreciation of time,
And willed his dust to the public domain.

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Our poetry selection for this week is “Not upon a vasty field,” by Tom Tipton. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.