James T. Farrell was born in Chicago, Illinois on February 27, 1904 to a large,
second-generation Irish-American family. His father, James, was a teamster and his
mother, Mary, a domestic servant. At the age of 3 his parents were unable to provide
for him and he was sent to live with his grandparents on Chicago’s south side. He
attended the University of Chicago from 1925 to 1929 but did not graduate. He began
to write seriously about 1925. He married Dorothy Butler in 1931 and they were
divorced by 1940. He then married Hortense Alden in 1941; they had two sons, Kevin
and John. The couple divorced in 1951. In 1955, he remarried his first wife Dorothy
but they separated in 1958. He met Cleo Paturis in 1960 and she was his partner
through the end of his life.
Farrell was very active in politics. He was a longtime friend of Frank Zeidler,
former Milwaukee Mayor and socialist. He identified early in his life as a Communist
and Marxist and was very active in Trotskyite politics joining the Socialist Workers
Party (SWP). He served as the chairman of the SWP’s Civil Rights defense Committee
from 1941-1945. In the later 1940s he parted ways with the SWP as it became more
involved with Stalinism.
As a novelist, journalist, and short story writer, he became known for his realistic
descriptions of the working class South Side Irish. In the early 1930s, he wrote his
most famous works about the character Studs Lonigan in a trilogy by the same name.
Also in the same lower class Irish setting was the Bernard Carr series and the Danny
O’Neill series. In total Farrell produced 52 volumes not including those in progress
at his death. Farrell was also a passionate baseball fan and wrote on the subject.
In addition to articles, he wrote two baseball focused books, one published in 1957
called My Baseball Diary and the second, Dreaming Baseball, was written in the 1950s but not
published until, well after his death, in 2007. Farrell died in New York City on
August 22, 1979.
