Although at first fastidious readers condemned Studs Lonigan for its frank, unromantic sexuality, course language and frequent brutality, today there is hardly an anthology, a critic or a literature class that does not list this tough, gritty, uncompromisingly honest novel of life in the slums of Chicago as one of the great literary works of this century. This is a timeless story of the slow, tragic degradation of a tough imaginative youth, a boy who dreams and hopes and-lost in his own futile fantasies-dies. The harsh squalid world he confronts has its part in young Studs downfall; however it is through his own choices and failings that he drifts to disaster.