Author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy, James T. Farrell (1904-79) was a native of Chicago, famous for the range and depth of his realistic portraits of the city's various populations that he drew from his own experiences and keen powers of observation. Charles Fanning, a professor of English and history and director of Irish and Irish Immigration Studies at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, wrote the introduction to the University of Illinois Press's 1993 paperback edition of Farrell's Studs Lonigan. He is the author of The Irish Voice in America: Irish-American Fiction from the Eighteenth Century to the Present.

"I read [Farrell] in my freshman year at Harvard, and it changed my life... Now, I realized you could write books about people who were something like the people you had grown up with. I couldn't get over the discovery." -- Norman Mailer