Voting Station

James T. Farrell

Please vote to return to collections.

Author

The Resume

    (February 27, 1904-August 22, 1979)
    Born in Chicago, Illinois
    Novelist and short story author
    Best known for the Studs Lonigan trilogy: ‘Young Lonigan’ (1932), ‘The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan’ (1934) and ‘Judgment Day’ (1935)
    Also wrote ‘Gas-House McGinty’ (1933), ‘Guillotine Party and Other Stories’ (1935), ‘A World I Never Made’ (1936), ‘Can All This Grandeur Perish? And Other Stories’ (1937), ‘Father and Son’ (1940), ‘Ellen Rogers’ (1941), ‘Bernard Clare’ (1946), ‘An American Dream Girl’ (1950), ‘The Face of Time’ (1953), ‘French Girls Are Vicious and Other Stories’ (1955), ‘A Dangerous Woman and Other Stories’ (1957), ‘My Baseball Diary’ (1957), ‘Boarding House Blues’ (1961), ‘A Brand New Life’ (1968), ‘Judith and Other Stories’ (1973) and ‘The Death of Nora Ryan’ (1978)

Why he might be annoying:

    He joined the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party.
    The same year that he divorced his second wife, he remarried his first wife (1955).
    He abused amphetamines in order to write for 20-hour stretches.
    His siblings were ticked off when he used thinly fictionalized versions of them as characters in his novels.
    He complained about ‘Studs Lonigan’ overshadowing his later work, commenting in the 60s, ‘My past is considered better than my future.’
    A sympathetic critic admitted about his writing style, ‘Reading a Farrell sentence requires an appetite for more wordage than is strictly necessary.’

Why he might not be annoying:

    When he was three, his parents sent him to live with his grandparents while his siblings stayed at home.
    He claimed to have never suffered writer’s block. (‘I like to write…. My problem is to find time to get it all down.’)
    Fellow writer Studs Terkel took his name from Studs Lonigan.
    He said, ‘People consider me a great failure because I’m not a millionaire. I never tried to be a millionaire.’
    He influenced Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut.

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 134 Votes: 64.18% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 3 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 11 Votes: 72.73% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 22 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 113 Votes: 66.37% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 8 Votes: 62.50% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 6 Votes: 50.0% Annoying