Product Description

A bestseller in 1924, this vivid piece of outlaw history has inexplicably faded from the public consciousness. Jim Tully takes us across the seamy underbelly of pre-WWI America on freight trains, and inside hobo jungles and brothels while narrowly averting railroad bulls (cops) and wardens of order.

Written with unflinching honesty and insight, Beggars of Life follows Tully from his first ride at age thirteen, choosing life on the road over a deadening job, through his teenage years of learning the ropes of the rails and -living one meal to the next.

Tully's direct, confrontational approach helped shape the hard-boiled school of writing, and later immeasurably influenced the noir genre. Beggars of Life was the first in Tully's five-volume memoir, dubbed the "Underworld Edition," recalling his transformation from road-kid to novelist, journalist, Hollywood columnist, chain maker, boxer, circus handyman, and tree surgeon.

Jim Tully (1891 - 1947) was a best-selling novelist and popular Hollywood journalist in the 1920s and '30s. Known as "Cincinnati Red" during his years as a road-kid, he counted prizefighter and publicist of Charlie Chaplin among his many jobs. He is considered (with Dashiel Hammett) one of the inventors of the hard-boiled style of American writing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #108911 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Customer Reviews

Forgotten Classic of the Hard-boiled Style Now Back in Print
In this account of his years on the road, Jim Tully achieved a perfect marriage of pared down prose and marginal subjects that launched his career as one of the best paid, most popular nonfiction writers in America at the time. With Beggars of Life it's not hard to see why Tully was so popular: this ostensibly simple story about hoboing both illuminates the early 20th century (entirely from the view of the reject and the freak and the "punkgrafter") and also manages to speak to the jaded, bored punks of today. It's a surprisingly wild read; race riots, deformities, violence, sex, drinking, cop-bashing, election-fixing, and corruption erupt throughout. But they are portrayed with such a simple elegance and detachment-- perhaps this is why it has fallen down one of the many memory holes our country reserves for dissenting work. The AK Press edition features a lively introduction by late pulp-legend Charles Willeford. As Willeford argues, Tully deserves to take his place beside Hemingway as a founder of the uniquely American, hard-boiled style of prose.