Studs Lonigan (Trilogy)

✍ Scribed by James T. Farrell

• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Year: 1934
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 572 KB
• Edition: Penguin Books 2001
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Paperback, 896 pages

Published 1935

Penguin Books 2001

Modern Library 100 Best Novels (1900-1998)

Omnibus Trilogy:

1- Young Lonigan (1932)

2- The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934)

3- Judgment Day (1935)

Introduction by: Ann Douglas

Collected here in one volume is James T. Farrell's renowned trilogy of the youth, early manhood, and death of Studs Lonigan. In this relentlessly naturalistic portrait, Studs starts out his life full of vigor and ambition, qualities that are crushed by the Chicago youth's limited social and economic environment. Studs's swaggering and vicious comrades, his narrow family, and his educational and religious background lead him to a life of futile dissipation.
An unparalleled example of American naturalism, the Studs Lonigan 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 Studs Lonigan, 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. Cited as an inspiration by writers as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut and Frank McCourt, Studs Lonigan stands as a masterpiece of social realism in the ranks of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.- Library of America Edition