James T Farrell and Nelson Algren

While reading up on James T Farrell I wondered if he had crossed paths with Nelson Algren. After all both were living in Chicago at the same time Google satisfied my curiosity.

Back in 1983, The New York Times published TWO REALISTS FROM CHICAGO, a review of both authors' final novels:

DURING their lifetimes Nelson Algren and James T. Farrell were often discussed together as two very similar and clearly important novelists of the Depression thirties, although neither was considered quite worthy of promotion to first-rank eminence. But they did in fact have a good deal in common besides their modesty of status. Both were committed social realists who at various stages of their careers were in and out of sympathy with the Marxist movement. Both spent most of their lives in Chicago and chose as the central subject of their fiction closely related and at times overlapping areas of urban proletarian experience. Farrell wrote his best novels - the Studs Lonigan and Danny O'Neill series - about the Chicago Irish working class in which he grew up and from which, like Danny, he ultimately managed to escape. Algren had far more flamboyant tastes and became a kind of Rabelaisian bard of the ghetto underworld of drug addicts, prostitutes, pimps, thieves and con men.

The reviewer only likes Algren's novel,

Although both wrote a quantity of books - Farrell 52 and Algren almost a dozen - and continued to write into their last years, neither gained significantly in reputation after the success of his earlier work. Farrell in his prime had a higher standard with the critics and a much larger readership than Algren enjoyed. Yet he remained through most of his career best known for his first books, the Studs Lonigan trilogy, and eventually won a curious kind of respectful infamy for the sheer volume of his production, his seemingly heroic and quite thankless dedication to the task of creating ever so slight variations on essentially the same story in novel after novel after novel. Algren remained forever identified with his third and best novel, 'The Man With the Golden Arm,' published in 1949, and made into a famous film. Both men died in their 70's, Farrell in 1979, Algren in 1981, and now two publishers have brought out their final novels. It would be pleasant to be able to say that these books bring to an appropriate and honorable conclusion the long and industrious careers of their authors. But that can only be said of one of them, Algren's 'The Devil's Stocking,' which confirms one's impression that Algren remained to the end the better writer. He had far richer verbal gifts than Farrell, and he had a much more vital relation with his materials as well as a larger and freer range of imaginative inventiveness.....

Woody Haut's Blog mentions Farrell in his article on Algren's Entrapment: 

Algren was part of a generation of writers that included James T. Farrell (in fact, there is a short piece in Entrapment which constitutes Algren's apology for dissing Farrell on ideological grounds and recognising that, though Farrell was not a great stylist, Studs Lonigan affected a generation of people), John Dos Passos, Richard Wright whose last remaining personage was probably Studs Terkel. They were all political radicals with a sense of the street and literary enough to hold their own with more established types. Algren has been compared favorably to Faulkner, and one can see why. Okay, so maybe he's more erratic, but at his best he is every bit Faulkner's equal.

The Houston Seminar describes the relationship like this:

...Between Dreiser and Saul Bellow, there was James T. Farrell, who wrote the Studs Lonigan trilogy and set the tone for tough guys and ethnic types like Nelson Algren whose Chicago: City on the Make (1951) has the swagger and unavoidable sentimentality Dreiser avoided....

 

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