Perhaps the central reason for Farrell's neglect is that he has confronted a problem modern America has determined to evade: our sense of history predicates a vision of Anglo-Saxon progress and expansion which our intellect no longer supports….

Farrell's work begins with his admission that our sense of historical mission, our destiny of significant resolvable struggle, is failing, but this admission does not then transmute itself into a richly textured literary sensibility: admission instead becomes a dramatized insistence. (p. 488)

[Farrell's prestige] coincided less with his merits than with a special set of circumstances operative in the 1930s. The Depression gave Americans their first intimation of the complexity and possible termination of their historical purpose, a suspicion that they inhabited a world unyielding to their intentions and conceptions. No twentieth-century author has understood and articulated this American fear better than Farrell….

Farrell dramatized in Studs that mass culture was...