SOURCE: "James T. Farrell: The City as Society," in Makers of the City, University of Massachusetts Press, 1990, pp. 119-58.

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.

No novelist of our time has so persistently identified the substance of his fiction with the teachings of the liberalizing city than James T. Farrell. His novels depict how characters make use of the city's commitment to build a public through shared, rational experience. His narrative strategy has been to present in great detail the often unnoticed and small ways these democratizing occasions are made possible. As a result, his writing often deals with the means by which a community or group helps widen an individual's understanding of self and others. His fiction, generally autobiographical, is so deeply implicated...