MY DAYS OF ANSER James T. Farrell Vanguard ($2.75).
In the early '30s, a somewhat owlish Chicago slum boy named James Thomas Farrell decided to make the U.S. slum-sensitive. He succeeded better than almost anybody but Al Capone. Farrell's Studs Lonigan (TIME, Feb. 19, 1934) became a synonym for the smalltime U.S. tough guy. With dogged earnestness, a lot of firsthand factuality (Farrell was born the son of a Chicago teamster in 1904) and a total lack of humor, Farrell painstakingly traced Studs's dingy career and its social context through three slablike volumes. None of the Studs series was quite...