Ann Douglas, Pete Hamill, Norman Mailer, Kevin McCarthy and Donald Yannella in New York Public Library Panel Discussion Celebrating Centennial of “Studs Lonigan” Author James T. Farrell

New York, NY, February 9, 2004 -- The New York Public Library kicks off its Spring 2004 public program February 25 at 6:30 p. m. with the James T. Farrell Centennial Celebration, a panel discussion devoted to the author best-known for his Studs Lonigan trilogy. The participants in the event are Columbia University professor Ann Douglas, columnist Pete Hamill, actor Kevin McCarthy, author Norman Mailer, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Rowan University Professor Emeritus Donald Yannella, who is the panel moderator and also the editor of Farrell’s interviews. Additionally, there will be a small exhibition showcasing materials from the Library’s collection relating to Farrell, including items from the two summers he spent at Yaddo, the writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he composed The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan.

The event will be held in the Celeste Bartos Forum at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Tickets are $10 for the general public, $7 for Library donors. For information on purchasing tickets please call 212-930-0855 or go to the public program web site at www.nypl.org/humanities/pep. This program is also the launch for the Library of America's Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy, edited by Pete Hamill, and for a reissue of the Studs Lonigan trilogy in paperback by Penguin (with an introduction by Ann Douglas).

Farrell has been called "a master of American naturalism," and the Studs Lonigan trilogy, with its remarkable attention to the rhythms and realities of Irish-American life on Chicago's South Side, has been acknowledged as a major influence on writers such as Norman Mailer and Pete Hamill. While Farrell's tremendous output included more than 50 books, including 25 novels and 17 collections of short fiction, he is also famous as a socialist activist and as an influential critic whose literary friends spanned the century: from Theodore Dreiser and Ezra Pound to Mary McCarthy and Kurt Vonnegut. Farrell was not unfamiliar with The New York Public Library. In his 1946 novel Bernard Clare the protagonist visits the Main Reading Room and declares that the Library represents “the world of the inner life of man.”

Ann Douglas is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and the author of several acclaimed works of American cultural history, including The Feminization of American Culture and Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s.
Pete Hamill is a syndicated columnist whose newspaper career spans four decades. His writing has appeared in the New York Post, the Daily News, The Village Voice, and The New Yorker, among other publications. His books include Flesh and Blood, A Drinking Life: A Memoir, Why Sinatra Matters, and, most recently, the novel Forever, which was published last year by Little, Brown.

Kevin McCarthy is an award-winning stage and screen actor. He is a founding member of the Actors Studio, and has performed in numerous stage and television productions, including Harry Outside, for which he won an Obie. He made his screen debut in Death of a Salesman, and has also appeared in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (both the classic 1956 original and the 1978 remake), The Misfits, The Howling, and Twilight Zone: The Movie, among other films.

Norman Mailer is the author of more than 50 works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Armies of the Night, which was honored with the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and The Executioner’s Song, for which he also received a Pulitzer Prize. His most recent books are Why Are We at War? and Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of more than 15 works of American history, biography, and political commentary. His books include A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Robert Kennedy and His Times (both of which were honored with the National Book Award), The Disuniting of America, and A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950.

Donald Yannella (Moderator) is a scholar of American literature whose books include Ralph Waldo Emerson and New Essays on Billy Budd. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Rowan University and is editing James T. Farrell’s interviews.

###

Press contact: Herb Scher or Raul Ramos, 212-221-7676.

th: pro