James T. Farrell – författare

The first volume of James T. Farrell's remarkable Studs Lonigan trilogyAn American classic in the vein of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the first book of James T. Farrell's powerful Studs Lonigan trilogy covers five months of the young hero's life in 1916, when he is sixteen years old. In this relentlessly naturalistic yet richly complex portrait, Studs is carried along by his swaggering and shortsighted companions, his narrow family, and his educational and religious background toward a fate that he resists yet cannot escape.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

In this text, Farrell challenges the leading radical literary critics of the 1930s, such as Michael Gold and Granville Hicks, reconsidering issues including the relative autonomy of literature from society and economics; the role of tradition in literary creation; the relation of literature to propaganda; and the nature of aesthetic value.

A Prairie State BookThese stories, chosen from ten separately published collections of James T. Farrell's short fiction, offer remarkable insights into the lives ofIrish Americans and other Chicagoans from 1910 to 1940. They are gems of the short fiction genre, unique, pioneering, and accomplished.  Farrell's stories offer a wonderful diversity of characters and experiences, from self-deluded, impoverished victims to portraits of the artist as  a young Irish-American living on Chicago's South Side. Charles Fanning's introduction presents Farrell as one of the best Illinois writers of the first half of the century and his stories as among the best in realistic short fiction anywhere.

A sprawling tale of two families' struggles with harsh urban realitiesThe first book in Farrell's five-volume series to be republished by the University of Illinois Press, A World I Never Made introduces three generations from two families, the working-class O'Neills and the lower-middle-class O'Flahertys. The lives of the O'Neills in particular reflect the tragic consequences of poverty, as young Danny O'Neill's parents--unable to sustain their large family--send him to live with his grandmother. Seen here at the age of seven, Danny is fraught with feelings of anxiety and dislocation as he learns the ins and outs of life on the street, confronting for the first time a world he never made.

The fourth novel in James T. Farrell’s pentalogy chronicles Danny O’Neill’s coming of age. Recording his reactions to initiation into college life at the University of Chicago and the imminent death of his grandmother, one of his primary caretakers, Danny realizes the value of time and gains confidence in his writing abilities. As he works on his first novel, he prepares to leave his family, his Catholicism, and his neighborhood in Chicago behind for a new life as a writer in New York.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.