From his grandfather, the colorful "Old Hughie," Tully had learned the value of a good story well told. From his father, also Jim Tully, he had inherited a love of reading (everything from Gustave Flaubert and Thomas Hardy to Alexandre Dumas and Sir Walter Scott). A nun at that Catholic orphanage where he spent six lonely childhood years had "taught him how to modulate his voice and speak words correctly" (encouraging him to read Dickens, Shakespeare, and Hugo). A librarian in Kent, Ohio, where he worked at a chain factory while looking for boxing matches, had given him the key question of his life: "What is the use of whipping the whole world and ending up a bartender?" Then there was the influence of writers who had become his constant traveling companions. During his years on the road, he had haunted libraries, discovering works by Twain, Balzac, and Dostoyevsky. "The road gave me one jewel beyond price," the former "library bum" said, "the leisure to read and dream. If it made me old and wearily wise at twenty, it gave me for companions the great minds of all the ages, who talked to me with royal words."

And, every step of the way, he carried pictures of three one-time drifters who had become internationally known authors: Jack London, Maxim Gorky, and John Masefield. If they had made it, so could he. "The chance was worth taking," Tully declared. "I would never be happy at anything else. . . I’ll write or starve." He plodded along, despite the awareness that the ranks of contenders were swarming with prospects better educated and infinitely more polished. When Jim Tully decided he’d rather be a writer than a fighter, few would have given the awkward plodder a chance to achieve much more than stumblebum status. Yet Tully knew that he was better prepared for this fight than many a college-trained scribbler raised with all of the "advantages." Poverty had been his earliest and harshest trainer: "Hunger and squalor were more easily endured than the loneliness of a groping boyhood." While his hardscrabble youth had left its share of deep psychological scars, the contrary winds of life had, in his words, "equally twisted and strengthened me for the sadder years ahead."

The road was his second great teacher. "I fraternized with human wrecks," Tully recalled. "I learned the secrets of traitors and crawlers and other fakers. . . Fortunately for me, there had always been some chemical in my nature that had kept my mind active so that I was not allowed to rot in hives of congested humanity. Tramping in wild and windy places, without money, food, or shelter, was better for me than supinely bowing to any conventional decree of fate."

By the time his first book, the semi-autobiographical "Emmett Lawler," was published in 1922, Tully had worked as a dishwasher, chainmaker, boxer, newspaper reporter, tree surgeon, circus handyman, and Hollywood press agent. He also had stockpiled most of the experiences and characters that would fill the fourteen books he would publish over the next twenty-one years. He had observed and absorbed the hard ways of hoboes, prizefighters, prostitutes, con artists, carnival performers, criminals, and drifters.