Philip
L.
Gerber and Jack C. Wolf
A CONVERSATION WITH JAMES T. FARRELL
Interviewer:
Mr. Farrell, you have been referred to by cntIcs as
Chicago's outstanding historian, if not that of the Midwest
generally. What was there about Chicago and the Midwest during
the 1920s that had a significant effect on your writing as a whole?
James T Farrell:
What had a particular effect on my works was the
University of Chicago.
It
was a great university. When I went
there I seethed with great ambition to learn and study. And then I
wanted to write, so I quit the university, gave up my scholarship,
which I had won on my grades, and just started writing. That was
on March 17, 1927.
Now, earlier in Chicago, there had been a considerable
cultural development. At the end of the Civil War there was
expansion and growth, economically and industrially. There was
a flood of new immigrants, a rise in population. Chicago in 1865
had a population of about one hundred fifty to one hundred sixty
thousand. In the 1890s
i~
had a million. There was almost a new
language being spoken. There were various dialects . There were
new types, a spectacle of grandeur and misery. The University of
Chicago, which literally was one of the great universities of
all
time, was founded on men like John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen,
and Albert Michelson, the scientist who developed the
Michelson-Morley tests. None of this was in Chicago earlier. I
discovered something of this development of the Midwest only
after I went to the University of Chicago.
My native sense of Chicago was much different. The
neighborhood I lived in, like most of the neighborhoods of that
time, was like a small town. I gained a broader sense of Chicago
when I first read Carl Sandburg's poem about hog butchers and
toolmakers. Incidentally, I was once asked to write a magazine
article on Theodore Dreiser, and the editor asked me if I couldn't
say Dreiser wrote the poem that Sandburg wrote-an interesting
Before his death in New York City on August 22, 1979, James T. Farrell visited the
State University College at Brockport, New York, to open the seventh season of the
Brockport Writers' Forum. Philip L. Gerber and Jack C . Wolf of the English
faculty interviewed him at that time for educational television .
