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My Days of Anger , one of the five novels in James T. Farrell’s O’Neill-O’Flaherty series, chronicles the lives of two Chicago Irish-Catholic families with young Danny O’Neill as the central character. Published fourth but coming last in the chronology of Danny’s life, My Days of Anger is a Künstlerroman; that is, a novel of a young protagonist’s developing an identity as an artist. Set on Chicago’s South Side from 1924 to 1927, the novel opens with Danny working nights and attending the University of Chicago days while initially aspiring to become a lawyer. As the novel closes, Danny has rejected this goal, the middle-class values of his family, his Catholicism, and the prejudices of his neighborhood, leaving Chicago for New York to become a writer.

Although most often published and read as a single novel, Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy comprises Young Lonigan: A Boyhood in the Chicago Streets (1932), The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), and Judgment Day (1935). Together the three novels chronicle the failed life of a young man growing up in a lower-middle-class Irish-Catholic neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. The trilogy opens with Studs as a strong, hopeful adolescent and closes with him as a sickly twenty-nine-year-old who dies of pneumonia with none of his dreams fulfilled.