how ''studs lonigan" was written
length, and the milieu described in it should be put down in greater
detail I had already begun to think of doing this, and Professor
Lovett's advice clinched the matter for me. In a sense, Professor
Linn and Professor Lovett are the spiritual godfathers of Studs
Lonigan.
When I began working on this material, I envisaged one long
novel, ending in a scene similar to that described in the story Studs. I
saw in the character of Studs Lonigan a number of tendencies at
work in a section of American life which I happened to know because
it had been part of my own education in living. I began to see Studs
not only as a character for imaginative fiction, but also as a social
manifestation. In the early stages of writing this work, I analyzed
my character as I considered him in his relations to his own world,
his own background. I set as my aim that of unfolding the destiny
of Studs Lonigan in his own words, his own actions, his own patterns
of thought and feeling. I decided that my task was not to state
formally what life meant to me, but to try and re-create a sense of
what life meant to Studs Lonigan. I worked on with this project,
setting up as an ideal the strictest possible objectivity. As I wrote,
the book enlarged and expanded. It grew into two novels, and
finally into three. There were numberless changes and expansions
of the original conception, alterations in emphasis, reconstructions of
the structure of events from the time that the work was first con-
ceived until the last line was written. However, to go into this
phase of the work would be dull and would sound too much like a
pretentious effort to bring one's laboratory out in public. All works
of imaginative fiction go through such a process of change and
expansion.
in
Studs Lonigan was conceived as a normal American boy of Irish-
Catholic extraction. The social milieu in which he lived and was
educated was one of spiritual poverty. It was not, contrary to some
misconceptions, a slum neighbourhood. Had I written StudsLonigan
as a story of the slums it would then have been easy for the reader
falsely to place the motivation and causation of the story directly in
immediate economic roots. Such a placing of motivation would have
obscured one of the most important meanings I wanted to inculcate
into my story: my desire to reveal the concrete effects of spiritual
poverty. It is readily known that poverty and slums cause spiritual
poverty in many lives. One of the important meanings I perceived
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