SOURCE: A review of Calico Shoes and Other Stories, in The Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. XI, No. 15, October 27, 1934, p. 250.

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.

Though he possesses certain literary attributes that make almost everything he writes distinctly worth reading, he has not as yet transcended limitations that have so far kept the greater part of his work from being thoroughly satisfactory and first-rate.

His virtues are many: a satisfactory facility with his medium, an almost dictaphonic ear for the speech of his lower middle-class characters, a pervasive sympathetic understanding of the inarticulate, the exploited, the lonely, the misunderstood. . . . He has been highly praised for his "uncompromising" realism, but he has not as yet learned to depersonalize experience that was highly personal, to transmute the facts of the life...