Studs Lonigan, looking tough, sat on the fireplug before the drugstore on the northeast corner of Fifty-eighth and Prairie.
—from Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy

James Thomas Farrell immortalized the gritty lives of first-and second-generation working-class Irish-Americans, drawing heavily on his own experience as one of 15 children in a family on Chicago’s
South Side. His youth is mirrored in some of his best-known characters, Studs Lonigan and Danny O’Neil, whom he described with naturalistic prose and contemporary urban slang.

Farrell attended the University of Chicago, where he published his first collection of short stories and essays. In 1929, he began writing Young Lonigan, the first part of the Studs Lonigan trilogy, while living
at 2023 East 72nd Street. He sold it to a publisher in Paris, where he and his wife traveled for a year.

Farrell moved to New York in 1932, plunging into the literary and political life of the city. He completed the Lonigan trilogy, publishing the next two volumes Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan in 1934 and
Judgement Day in 1935. A coming-of-age epic about a young Chicago street tough that was considered a raunchy and radical indictment of American society, it is Farrell’s most famous and respected work.

A political and social activist, by the end of his life Farrell had published 42 volumes of fiction and numerous collections of short stories. They include Gas-House McGinty, Tommy Gallagher’s Crusade
and The Death of Nora Ryan.