Themes
Farrell wrote these three novels at a time of national despair. During the Great Depression, many of America's most gifted writers and artists hoped to create a powerful work of art that would fully expose the evils of capitalism and cause a political and economic revision of the American system. Farrell chose to use his own personal knowledge of Irish-American life on the South Side of Chicago to create a description of an average American slowly destroyed by the "spiritual poverty" of his environment. Both Chicago and the Irish-American Roman Catholic Church of that era are described in detail, and faulted. Farrell describes Studs sympathetically as Studs slowly deteriorates, changing from a tough but fundamentally good-hearted, adventurous teenage boy to an embittered, physically weak alcoholic.
Read more about this topic: Studs Lonigan
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)