SOURCE: "The Lost World of James T. Farrell's Short Stories," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 22, No. 1, February 1976, pp. 36-51.

In this essay, O'Connell argues for the centrality of Farrell's vision of the Irish-Catholic experience in his fiction.

James T. Farrell can be an easy mark for a critic. His faults and his failures have often been attacked and are, as we shall see, only too obvious. Many of his some 250 short stories and roughly twenty-two novels are inferior pieces of literature and sometimes embarrassingly bad. At his best, however, in a number of the short stories and in Studs Lonigan, he renders accessible to us a world which we might otherwise never encounter. And for the Irish-Americans among us, indeed perhaps for all those Americans from an ethnic or racial minority, were it not for his voice it would be harder to take the first necessary steps toward...