Overview

"Many saw the dark side of the American dream, but none wrote about it like Jim Tully. Having spent six years of his childhood in a Cincinnati orphanage, Tully returned to his hometown of St. Marys, Ohio before climbing aboard a freight train in 1901. Drifting across the country as a ""road kid,"" he spent his teens, sleeping in hobo jungles, avoiding railroad cops, and haunting public libraries. After six years on the road, he settled in Kent, Ohio where he boxed professionally and began to write. Following a move to Hollywood where he worked for Charlie Chaplin, Tully issued a stream of critically acclaimed books that serve as a dark and astonishing chronicle of the American underclass. Having established himself as a major American author, he turned his attention to Hollywood writing dozens of articles about the movies, often shocking the Hollywood establishment. Along the way, he picked up such close friends as W. C. Fields, Jack Dempsey, H. L. Mencken, and Frank Capra. He also memorably crossed paths with Jack London, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, and Langston Hughes."

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9781948986489

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Reviews

"""[Jim Tully] is a unique American voice, born in unspeakable poverty, shaped by hardships, and illuminated by enormous compassion... I love his books, and I loved getting to know him in the pages of this wonderful, hugely important biography."" -Ken Burns (from the Foreword) ""Jim Tully stands out in American literature as one of the few realist writers who did not just visit the rougher environs of human experience for material, but was fully of those depths... That Tully wrote at all was a miracle; that he wrote so well is a gift to the world."" -John Sayles ""If all men wrote as honestly as Jim Tully, setting forth their goodness and their nastiness equally, with no attempt at exaggerating either, books would be better and fewer."" -The Saturday Review of Literature"

Author Information

"Paul J. Bauer is a used and rare book dealer in Kent, Ohio. He is the co-author of Frazier Robinson's autobiography, ""Catching Dreams: My Life in the Negro Baseball Leagues."" Mark Dawidziak is the author or editor of 25 books, including ""The Columbo Phile: A Casebook,"" ""Mark My Words: Mark Twain on Writing,"" ""Everything I Need to Know I Learned in The Twilight Zone"" and ""A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe."""

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