Studs Lonigan is the subject of a trilogy of novels by American author James T. Farrell: Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day. James Thomas Farrell was born on Feb. ...
In James T. Farrell's classic novel of Irish life, Studs Lonigan, Farrell describes gang participation in the 1919 race riots. Farrell's sympathetic and graphic protrayal of the growing up of the young gang member, Studs Lonigan, captures the split between the oppression of the Irish and their oppression of others, particularly African Americans. This excerpt, from the second novel of the Lonigan trilogy, "The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan" helps us understand the virulence of racism and how its unchecked rapacity helped produce and reproduce the ghetto.
Farrell wrote StudsLonigan during a period of widespread working-class unrest and violence against organized labor, and then during the hard early years of the Depression; Bellow wrote The Adventures of Augie March in the prolonged period of optimism that followed World War II.
An unparalleled example of American naturalism, the StudsLonigan trilogy follows the hopes and dissipations of its remarkable main character--a would-be "tough guy" and archetypal adolescent, born to Irish-American parents on Chicago's South Side--through the turbulent years of World War I, the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Depression.
The three novels--Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of StudsLonigan, and Judgment Day--offer a vivid sense of the textures of real life: of the institutions of Catholicism, the poolroom and the dance marathon, romance and marriage, gangsterism and ethnic rivalry, and the slang of the street corner.
StudsLonigan is the subject of a trilogy of novels by American author James T. Farrell: Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of StudsLonigan, and Judgment Day.
The StudsLonigan story was made into a film in 1960, directed by Irving Lerner and starring Christopher Knight in the title role.
In 1979 StudsLonigan was produced as a television miniseries starring Harry Hamlin, Colleen Dewhurst, Brad Dourif, and Charles Durning.
Feeds |
Contact