Farrell, James T.

FARRELL, JAMES T. (1904–1979). A world-famous novelist and literary critic, James Thomas Farrell was born in Chicago of second-generation Irish American working-class parents but was raised by middle-class relatives. He embraced socialist ideas while episodically attending the University of Chicago between 1925 and 1929. After a year as an expatriate in Paris, he moved to New York City in April 1932, where he became a sympathizer of the Communist Party.

Farrell contributed to the Party’s New Masses as early as 1930, although his writing only appeared there with frequency in 1934. He also published in the Daily Worker, addressed the 1935 American Writers Congress, and regularly contributed “Theatre Chronicle” to Partisan Review, literary organ of the New York City chapter of the John Reed Clubs. In these same years he produced his best-known work, the “Studs Lonigan Trilogy,” consisting of Young Lonigan: A Boyhood in the Chicago Streets (1932), The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), and Judgment Day (1935).

Farrell considered himself part of the movement of revolutionary writers allied with the Party, but was also fiercely independent about his writing style and judgments about literary practice. Throughout his career, in which he published more than fifty books, he held the conviction that his novels and short stories could improve social conditions by examining the growth and stultification of the human personality.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Farrell steeped himself in the texts of classical Marxism and Leninism, studying the policy and practice of the international Communist movement with care. By 1936 he reached political views considerably influenced by the exiled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, as well as the American Trotskyists, who had recently become a faction in the Socialist Party. That year Farrell issued A Note on Literary Criticism, a major text in the development of Marxist aesthetics in the United States. Here he systematically repudiated Communist Party cultural policies, elaborating a perspective compatible with Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution (1922).

After the autumn of 1936, Farrell more openly became a supporter of the Trotskyists who founded the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in late 1937. Until mid-1944, he worked with the SWP on several projects. These included the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, organized to allow Trotsky (who had accepted political asylum in Mexico) a hearing during the Moscow Trials, and the Civil Rights Defense Committee, which defended Trotskyist and Teamster victims of the Smith Act.

Following a political dispute in which he accused the SWP of sectarianism, he collaborated with Max Shachtman’s Workers Party, which had originally split from the SWP in 1940. Selected essays in Marxist cultural criticism were anthologized in The League of Frightened Philistines (1945) and Literature and Morality (1947), many of the latter first appearing in the pages of the Workers Party’s New International.

In the spring of 1948, Farrell changed his views drastically, becoming an anticommunist social democrat. In the 1950s he served as chairman of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, and in the 1960s he supported Hubert Humphrey. During the final year of his life he belonged to Social Democrats U.S.A., an organization on the far-right wing of the spectrum of social democracy.

Branch, Edgar M. James T. Farrell. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971.

Landers, Robert K. An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell. New York: Encounter Books, 2004.

Wald, Alan M. James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

Inventory of the James T. Farrell-Clio Paturis Papers, 1909-2006. The Newberry Library. Chicago. https://mms.newberry.org/xml/xml_files/FarrellPaturis.xml