What I instinctively knew when I first read Farrell now seems to me his major contribution to American writing: his stubborn insistence on the validity of all lives for the creation of fiction. In this, he followed the lessons of his own masters, Balzac and the 19th-century European realists and Dreiser, writers whom we conveniently pigeonhole but who really have little in common other than their insistence that craft in fiction be matched by situation…. Studs Lonigan is certainly among the more memorable realistic fictions ever written in this country, but it would be difficult to cull a single memorable phrase from all of its pages. The work does not really rely on language but rather on the situations language describes and on the relentlessness with which Farrell hunts Studs down for us. So many of the terms critics love to use to praise a work of fiction...