James T. Farrell was born in 1904 in Chicago, Illinois. If there is an American author of this century who has suffered from overexposure, it is James T. Farrell. Resisting commercial pressures and testing the patience of critics, he was too fiercely independent to compromise his personal standards in order to reach a wide audience. Yet he managed to publish more than 50 books, including 28 novels and 16 collections of short stories Almost all of his novels form a part of four series on which his reputation largely rests, but the fact that only Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy (1932-1935) remains in print would suggest that his place in literature is still to be determined. His second major cycle… is the out-of-print Danny O'Neill pentalogy published between 1936 and 1953. It includes A World I Never Made, No Star Is Lost, Father and Son, My Days of Anger, and The Face of Time. The Bernard Carr trilogy (1946-1952) consists of Bernard Clare, The Road Between, and Yet Other Waters, all of which are out of print. All three series are semiautobiographical works, with the first two set in Chicago, where Farrell grew up in the Irish slums of the South Side, and the third showing how the central figure achieves success as a writer in New York City from 1927 to 1936. After 1958 Farrell was engaged primarily in writing a new series called The Universe of Time, which also has a central autobiographical character, Eddie Ryan, but which Farrell envisioned as "a relativistic panorama of our times" dealing with "man's creativity and his courageous acceptance of impermanence." Of some 30 projected volumes in the series, 10 were published in Farrell's lifetime. They are Boarding House Blues (1961), The Silence of History (1963), What Time Collects (1964), When Time Was Born (1966), New Year's Eve 1929 (1967), A Brand New Life (1968), Judith (1969), Invisible Swords (1970), The Dunne Family (1976), and The Death of Nora Ryan (1978). Of Farrell's work it has been said that Farrell will be given his place as a kind of William Dean Howells of Jackson Park in recognition of his faithfulness in recording the day-to-day suffering, sentimentality, dignity, coarseness, and despair of people living in Chicago. Only Studs Lonigan, however, has captured a wide audience to date. That series is read largely for its historical interest as a vivid period piece of slice-of-life realism. Farrell's objective method of presenting experience, his reluctance to point a moral, and his naturalistic philosophy have offended some readers and critics, but time may show that it is Farrell's freedom from moralism and transient commitments that make him capable of seeing individual experience in broad and universal terms. Farrell died in 1979.