James T. Farrell

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For the Anglo-Irish novelist, see James Gordon Farrell.

James Thomas Farrell (27 February 1904 - August 22, 1979) was an American novelist.

Farrell was born in Chicago, Illinois to a large Irish-American family, which included siblings Earl, Joseph, Helen, John and Mary. In addition there were several other siblings who died in childbirth, as well as one who died from the influenza epidemic in 1917. He attended Mt. Carmel High School (then known as St. Cyril) with future Egyptologist Richard Anthony Parker, and later the University of Chicago. He began writing when he was 21 years old. A novelist, journalist, and short story writer known for his realistic portraits of the working class Irish on the South Side of Chicago, James T. Farrell based his writing on his own experiences. He tried to show how people's destinies are shaped by the era and the environment in which they live. One of his most famous works was the Studs Lonigan trilogy, which was made into a film in 1960 and later into a television miniseries in 1979. The trilogy was voted number 29 on the Modern Library's list of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.

Farrell was an avid baseball fan and well versed in the statistics of the game. During one lecture tour about 1950 where he lectured at several universities in Missouri and Colorado he was as apt to tell baseball tales as he was to talk about his fictional works. One this tour Farrell was accompanied by his young son Kevin, (later Dr. Kevin J. Farrell), his sister Mary Farrell Holland, and his nephew, Sean F. Holland.

Farrell was also active in Trotskyist politics and joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). He came to agree with Albert Goldman and Felix Morrow's criticisms of the SWP and Fourth International leaderships. With Goldman, he left the group in 1946 to join the Workers Party.

Within the Workers Party, Goldman and Farrell worked closely. In 1948, they developed criticisms of its policies, claiming that the party should support the Marshall Plan and also Norman Thomas' presidential candidacy. Having come to believe that only capitalism could defeat Stalinism, they left, to join the Socialist Party of America. In the late 1960's, disenchanted with the political "center", while impressed with the SWP's involvement in the Civil Rights and US Anti-Vietnam War movements, he reestablished contact with his former comrades of two decades earlier. He attended one of more SWP-sponsored Militant Forum events (probably in NYC), but never rejoined the Trotskyist movement.