James T. Farrell Collections books in order

Reading order

James T. Farrell published sixteen collections of short fiction, essays, and poetry between 1935 and 2007. The early collections, beginning with Guillotine Party and Other Stories, were written during the same period as the Studs Lonigan and Danny O’Neill novels and share their settings, themes, and characters. Farrell was a natural short story writer whose spare, observational style suited the form well. Stories like those in Can All This Grandeur Perish? (1937) and To Whom It May Concern (1944) capture moments of working-class life in Chicago with the same unflinching realism as his novels.

Later collections like Dangerous Woman and Other Stories (1957) and Judith and Other Stories (1973) continued in the same vein, though Farrell also branched into literary essays and even poetry. The Collected Poems of James T. Farrell appeared in 1965, and James T. Farrell: Literary Essays, 1954-1974 gathered his critical writing. Posthumous volumes, including Chicago Stories (1998) and When Boyhood Dreams Come True (2007), collected previously unpublished or hard-to-find pieces. Taken together, these collections show a writer who never stopped working and never strayed far from his subject.