James T. Farrell Books in Order

Sixteen-year-old Studs Lonigan spends five months navigating Chicago life in 1916. His friends, family, school, and religion shape his choices as swagger and youthful hopes collide with the limitations of the world around him.

Farrell’s early Chicago stories examine lives shaped by poverty, prejudice, and frustrated ambition. Among their subjects are racial violence and the physical toll of competitive entertainment, portraying people struggling within social conditions that constrain their choices.

As the Depression tightens its grip on Chicago, Studs Lonigan faces failing health, dwindling savings, and the demands of a troubled family. His relationship with Catherine offers hope, but old habits complicate his attempts to change.

Farrell defends a Marxist approach to literature while challenging rigid political judgments of artistic value. His argument examines the relationship between individual creativity, social conditions, ideology, and propaganda, resisting attempts to reduce literary criticism to party doctrine.

Seven-year-old Danny O'Neill goes to live with his grandmother because his parents cannot support their large family. Amid working-class Chicago, he begins discovering the anxieties, divisions, and demands that shape the world around him.

Danny O'Neill approaches adulthood through high school, family loss, and his first full-time job. His difficulty connecting with his father and peers unfolds against the emotional and financial pressures facing his Chicago family.

Ellen Rogers enjoys attracting men and making them suffer, until she becomes involved with a practiced seducer whose cynicism matches her own. Their relationship turns flirtation and vanity into a struggle with painful consequences.

These stories follow city dwellers shaped by work, money, family, and ambition. Actors, writers, children, and workers confront disappointment and contradiction, revealing how ordinary relationships can carry both moments of tenderness and the threat of violence.

Aspiring novelist Bernard moves from Chicago to New York, hoping to turn his experiences into literature. As he enters the city’s radical political circles, artistic ambition becomes entangled with questions about integrity and belonging.

This collection brings together nine short stories, including the title story and 'Twenty Five Bucks,' with passages from five novels. It offers a selection of Farrell's shorter fiction alongside excerpts from his longer work.

Writer Bernard Carr struggles with literary ambitions, marriage, and radical politics in Depression-era New York. Encounters with editors, activists, and fellow writers test his confidence, while family obligations draw him back toward his Chicago past.

In a Chicago express-company office, dispatcher McGinty and his coworkers spend their days amid arguments, crude jokes, and competing demands. Their working relationships reveal how prejudice, frustration, and the need to earn a living shape life outside work.

At the University of Chicago, Danny O'Neill begins developing confidence in his writing while facing his grandmother's approaching death. As he works on a novel, he prepares to leave his family, neighborhood, and religious upbringing behind.

Farrell combines memories of becoming a writer with essays on literature, politics, and society. Discussions of Joyce, Dreiser, Anderson, and naturalism sit alongside reflections on censorship and the responsibilities that connect writing with public life.

Farrell visits the young state of Israel and records what he sees and hears. Conversations with Israelis and their Arab neighbors frame his observations of a country confronting the consequences of its creation.

The final O'Neill family novel turns back toward their immigrant beginnings and the decline of Danny's grandfather and aunt. Experiences of leaving Ireland and settling in Chicago reveal the fears and losses behind the family's later life.

James T. Farrell retells the story of Adam and Eve in a short illustrated work. Stephen Dwoskin supplies the accompanying drawings for this treatment of the biblical account of the first human couple.

In late-1920s Chicago, divorced Anne Daniels begins an affair with Roger Raymond, seeking a fresh start. As their initial excitement gives way to boredom, questions of dependence and purpose complicate the new life she hopes to build.

Eleven stories follow ordinary people through marriages, love affairs, family relationships, and solitary lives. Across these encounters, feelings of exile from home, the past, or oneself shape their efforts to find connection and understand changing circumstances.

Irish immigrants leave their homeland to make a life in America. Their hopes for belonging collide with the pain of separation and the shame of being treated as outsiders in their adopted country.

After Nora Ryan suffers a severe stroke in 1946, her scattered children gather in South Side Chicago. Confined together during winter weather, they face family tensions, old obligations, and the uncertain days surrounding their mother’s illness.

Eight brief stories and sketches bring together a selection of Farrell’s shorter writing, including two pieces first published in this collection.

New York intellectual life in the 1930s provides the setting for Sam Holman and the people around him. Farrell examines the relationships and convictions of a community caught in a turbulent political and cultural period.

These selected stories portray Irish Americans and other Chicago residents between 1910 and 1940. Drawn from ten of Farrell's collections, they follow impoverished families, self-deceiving characters, and a young artist finding his way on the South Side.

Farrell examines literature and popular culture through essays on writers including Joyce, Hemingway, Dreiser, and Dostoevsky. Discussions of Hollywood, ideology, and the making of Studs Lonigan connect questions of artistic form with the cultural forces surrounding it.

Mickey Donovan fulfills a childhood dream when he joins the Chicago White Sox in 1919. His delight in reaching the major leagues is tested when the Black Sox scandal exposes betrayal beneath the game he loves.

Danny O'Neill grows up between the private pressures of his family and the public life of Chicago's streets. Poverty and conflicting expectations deepen his confusion as the O'Neill and O'Flaherty families continue their struggle.

This collection brings together eleven short stories and the three-act play The Mowbray Family, presenting a selection of Farrell’s shorter fiction alongside his work for the stage.