In this essay, O'Connell argues for the centrality of Farrell's vision of the Irish-Catholic experience in his fiction.

In the following excerpt from a 1957 lecture at Miami University, Farrell discusses the major influences on his writing, his opinions on authorial intentions and aesthetics, and his perspective on writers of the 1920s and 1930s.

In this excerpt, Wald contends that Farrell's political concerns are a significant aspect of his work.

In the excerpt below, O'Malley argues that Farrell's fictional world is unremittingly bleak and spiritually degenerate, the result of a decayed civilization and an impoverished Catholicism.

In the following excerpt, Fried discusses the role of the city in Farrell's writing, particularly Farrell's understanding of the city and its culture as a crucial determinant of human experience.

In the excerpt below, Lovett discusses Farrell's commitment to present truthfully his observations of people under the pressures of demoralizing circumstances and decaying human institutions.

In this excerpt, Grattan describes Farrell as an optimistic moralist who believes in man's entitlement to freedom.

In this excerpted paper, which was originally presented as a lecture at Southampton College in 1974, Farrell asserts that genuine writing demands both knowledge of and respect for the past.

[Farrell's] characters continually pat psychic pockets to assure themselves that their pasts are intact. Such characters rarely strip their personalities bare; they clothe them, instead, with steady if minute accretions of experience. Characterization is Farrell's principal strength as a novelist, and it derives from the poor man's existentialism to which he subscribes. With the possible exception of Eddie Ryan, who figures either centrally or peripherally in most volumes of the cycle, ...

What I instinctively knew when I first read Farrell now seems to me his major contribution to American writing: his stubborn insistence on the validity of all lives for the creation of fiction. In this, he followed the lessons of his own masters, Balzac and the 19th-century European realists and Dreiser, writers whom we conveniently pigeonhole but who really have little in common other than their insistence that craft in fiction be matched by situation…. Studs Lonigan is certainly among the more memo...

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 in...

In the following review of Can All This Grandeur Perish? and Other Stories, Kazin finds much to condemn and praise in Farrell's short stories; repulsed by the sordidness of Farrell's soulless characters, he is nonetheless intrigued by the brutal honesty of his characterizations.

Below, Rohrberger observes that modern civilization's lack of spiritual values is the cause of individual and societal failure in Farrell's short fiction.

In the following estimation of Farrell's collection, Ferguson dismisses Farrell's short stories for their squalor and slovenly technique.

A landmark in American literature has just been achieved with the publication of James T. Farrell's fiftieth book, The Dunne Family. Farrell is known as one of the major Chicago novelists, a naturalist, a modern classic. Yet in many people's minds, he has been locked into a dead-issue decade; his work is thought to be synonymous with the reductive struggles and frustrated ideals of the 30's. The irony is that during the 30's Farrell was not only popular and recognized, with his f...

Below, Rugoff finds Farrell's novella Tommy Gallagher's Crusade a frighteningly accurate portrayal of the mindless hatred that characterized the growing Fascist movement in America during the 1930s.

In this review, Forgotson admires those stories in $1000 A Week and Other Stories that provide the reader with some understanding of the human experience, but states that the majority of the stories lack significance.

In this excerpted review of Guillotine Party and Other Stories, Trilling describes Farrell's artistic vision as inadequate to the task of exploring the complexities of modern life.

In the following review of An American Dream Girl, Algren argues that Farrell's lack of emotional involvement in his writing is an artistic failing.

Below, Oates takes issue with Farrell's compression of characterization, which she sees as a distortion of truth.

In the following estimation of An American Dream Girl, Maloney states that Farrell possesses a place in American literary history not for his technique or style, but for the directness and power of his vision.

In the following excerpted review of French Girls Are Vicious and Other Stories, Holman points out that although Farrell's primary weaknesses are his naturalistic narrative technique and flat use of language, his chief strength is his unflinching and powerful honesty.

In the following review of To Whom It May Concern and Other Stories, Kupferberg contends that Farrell's style and ideas are most successful in his longer works.

In the following excerpted review, Phillips observes that several of Farrell's more recent short stories are among his best short fiction.

In the following review, Rothman deplores the pessimism and spiritual sterility characterizing Farrell's collection of short stories When Boyhood Dreams Come True and Other Stories.

Below, Getlein argues that Farrell's commitment to truth, his humility, and his compassion outweigh any stylistic defects.

In this review, Phillips notes that although Farrell returns to the same themes and types of characters of his earlier works, one finds in this collection a mellower and warmer writer.

Farrell's major fiction ("the story of America as I knew it") is funded so greatly by the struggles of his youth and maturity that we are in danger of reading the Bernard Carr trilogy as mere autobiography. (p. 52) I want to suggest, however, that the trilogy is an act of, and meditation upon, the historiography of culture. The novels express—and dramatize—the problems besieging a writer who wishes to study the politics of social life. For both Farrell and Carr vivify a me...

Below, Kupferberg notes the wider range of Farrell's fiction in A Dangerous Woman and Other Stories as the author incorporates a gallery of new European characters and locales into his work.

In the following excerpt, Brown argues that Farrell, despite frequent stylistic infelicities, remains an important writer who asks crucial questions about the direction and consequences of American capitalism.

In the following assessment of Farrell's first collection, Kronenberger praises the harsh realism of Farrell's characterization.

In the following excerpt, the reviewer observes that Farrell's writing is marred by his inclusion of unnecessary details and facts from his own experiences.

In the following assessment of The Life Adventurous and Other Stories, Match observes that Farrell's writing, as a whole, provides an honest and compelling vision of American lower-class society.

In the following review of A Dangerous Woman and Other Stories, Peden observes that Farrell's later fiction shows greater humor and more variety than his earlier fiction.

In this review of Judith and Other Stories, Barnes remarks that Farrell's work continues to be dominated by grim and hopelessly limited characters.

In this essay, Farrell answers those critics who question autobiographical elements of his work.

The world of most of Farrell's fiction is not a pretty or happy one, since, as he has said, much of his writing has been concerned with portraying "conditions which brutalize human beings and produce spiritual and material poverty." (p. 267) It must be admitted that a number of Farrell's stories, especially his earlier ones, show the influence of other writers. Farrell has frequently treated everyday characters and the emptiness, vulgarity, or sordidness of their lives in the man...