Jim Tully

Jim Tully (June 3, 1886 – June 22, 1947) was a vagabond, pugilist, and American writer. His critical and commercial success in the 1920s and 1930s may qualify him as the greatest long shot in American literature.

Born near St. Marys, Ohio to James Dennis and Bridget Marie Lawler Tully, an Irish immigrant ditch-digger and his wife, Tully enjoyed a relatively happy but impoverished childhood until the death of his mother in 1892. Unable to care for him, his father sent him to an orphanage in Cincinnati. He remained there for six years. What further education he acquired came in the hobo camps, boxcars, railroad yards, and public libraries scattered across the country. Finally, weary of the road, he arrived in Kent, Ohio, where he worked as a chain maker, professional boxer, and tree surgeon. He also began to write, mostly poetry published in the local newspapers. He moved to Hollywood in 1912, when he began writing in earnest. His literary career took two distinct paths. He became one of the first reporters to cover Hollywood. As a free-lancer he was not constrained by the studios and wrote about Hollywood celebrities (including Charlie Chaplin, for whom he had worked) in ways that they did not always find agreeable. For these pieces, rather tame by current standards, he became known as the most-hated man in Hollywood—a title he relished. Less lucrative but closer to his heart were the books he wrote about his life on the road and the American underclass. He also wrote an affectionate memoir of his childhood with his extended Irish family, as well as novels on prostitution, boxing, Hollywood, and a travel book. While some of the more graphic books ran afoul of the censors, they also garnered both commercial success and critical acclaim from, among others, H.L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan, and Rupert Hughes, who wrote that Tully "has fathered the school of hard-boiled writing so zealously cultivated by Ernest Hemingway and lesser luminaries."

Tully married Florence May Bushnell on October 14, 1910 in Kent, Ohio. They had two children together: T. Alton Tully, born August 3, 1911 in Kent and daughter Trilby Jean Tully born November 13, 1918 in California. Tully later had two additional marriages, to Marna, Margaret Rider Myers in 1925, and finally to Myrtle Zwetow on June 28, 1933 in Ventura, California.

Autobiography

• Beggars of Life (1924) (New York: Albert & Charles Boni)
• Circus Parade (1927) (New York: Albert & Charles Boni)
• A Man of the New School (1931) (Cincinnati: Greater Hotel Gibson in Cincinnati)

Novels

• Emmett Lawler (1922) (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.)
• Jarnegan (1926) (New York: Albert & Charles Boni)
• Shanty Irish (1928) (New York: Albert & Charles Boni)
• Shadows of Men (1930) (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company)
• Beggars Abroad (1930) (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company)
• Blood on the Moon (1931) (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc.)
• Laughter in Hell (1932) (New York: Albert & Charles Boni)
• Ladies in the Parlor (1935) (New York: Greenberg: Publisher)
• The Bruiser (1936) (New York: Greenberg: Publisher)
• Biddy Brogan’s Boy (1942) (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons)

Profiles

• A Dozen and One (1943) (Hollywood: Murray & Gee). CONTENTS: Introduction / Raymond Chandler. -- Charlie Chaplin—Clark Gable—Jack Dempsey—Diego Rivera—George Jean Nathan—Wilson Mizner—Jim Cruze—Arnold Bennett—Tod Sloan—Paul Bern—Walter Winchell—Henry Armstrong—H.L. Mencken.

Plays

• Black Boy w/ Frank Dazey (1926) play
• Twenty Below w/ Robert Nichols (1927) play (London: Robert Holden & Co. Ltd.)