In American classic in the vein of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, this first book of James T. Farrell's powerful Studs Lonigan trilogy covers five months of the young hero's life in 1916, when he is sixteen years old. In this relentlessly naturalistic yet richly complex portrait, Studs is carried along by his swaggering and shortsighted companions, his narrow family, and his educational and religious background toward a fate that he resists yet cannot escape.