ABSTRACT
Most people familiar with American fiction associate James T. Farrell with the early twentieth-century Chicago Irish characters he so vividly painted in the Studs Lonigan trilogy and O'Neill-O'Flaherty series. Farrell's father, James Francis Farrell, was also the child of Irish immigrants. He too was born in Chicago; for a time he attended grammar school and eventually taught himself to read and write. Farrell quit his job and gave up night school to become a gas station attendant and save money for his real key to the outside world—matriculation at the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago experience provided the intellectual explosion that taught him the power of ideas as well as the power of the human mind to shape the destiny of an individual, who could in turn better his/her own life and the quality of society.
