Chicago Stories (Prairie State Books)

A Prairie State Book
These stories, chosen from ten separately published collections of James T. Farrell's short fiction, offer remarkable insights into the lives of
Irish Americans and other Chicagoans from 1910 to 1940. They are gems of the short fiction genre, unique, pioneering, and accomplished.
 
Farrell's stories offer a wonderful diversity of characters and experiences, from self-deluded, impoverished victims to portraits of the artist as  a young Irish-American living on Chicago's South Side. Charles Fanning's introduction presents Farrell as one of the best Illinois writers of the first half of the century and his stories as among the best in realistic short fiction anywhere.
 

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.