Studs Lonigan is the name of the protagonist in James T. Farrell's Depression-era trilogy (Young Lonigan (1932), The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), and Judgement Day (1935)). Lonigan is a young Irish-American Catholic coming up on the South Side of Chicago. He is tough and good-hearted, searches for meaningful spirituality, criticizes the system, and later in life, battles alcoholism. "[Lonigan] thought of how when you went out and listened to what people said," writes Farrell, "you heard all kinds of things, people washing their dirty linen in public, talking about friends and business, and it made him think about how the world must be, at every minute, so full of people fighting, and jazzing, and dying, and working, and losing jobs, and it was a funny world, all right, full of funny people, millions of them." The writer Studs Terkel adopted his pseudonym from these books.