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The Novels of Jim Tully

Emmett Lawler (1922) (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.)

Read an excerpt: Vivian

Beggars of Life (1924) (New York: Albert & Charles Boni)

Read an excerpt: The Man of Visions.

Jarnegan (1926) (New York: Albert & Charles Boni)

The first Hollywood novel. Jarnegan is a director and a swine.

Read an excerpt: Chapter Ten

Circus Parade (1927) (New York: Albert & Charles Boni)

Read an excerpt: A Negro Girl

Shanty Irish (1928) (New York: Albert & Charles Boni)

Read an excerpt: The Great Famine

Shadows of Men (1930) (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company)

Chapter 13

A Lighter of Fires

"Dippy had always been a pyromaniac..."

Look at some of William Gropper's drawings from the book.

Beggars Abroad (1930) (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company)

Read an excerpt: A Man and a Woman (about James Joyce and Gertrude Stein)

Blood on the Moon (1931) (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc.)

Read an excerpt: Whither Thou Goest

Laughter in Hell (1932) (New York: Albert & Charles Boni)

Read an excerpt: A Convict and a Fly

Ladies in the Parlor (1935) (New York: Greenberg: Publisher)

Read an excerpt: Chapter 14

The Bruiser (1936) (New York: Greenberg: Publisher)

Read an excerpt: Chapter 4

Biddy Brogan’s Boy (1942) (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons)

Read an excerpt: Chapter 3

With the publication of his second book, "Beggars of Life" (1924), Jim Tully achieved the widespread literary recognition he had been pursuing with a bruiser’s tenacity since leaving the ring. He was thirty-eight. He had battled incredibly long odds to make himself into a writer.

He had found the raw material for his stories in freight cars, circus tents, whore houses, prison cells, hobo jungles, factories, boxing rings, and saloons.

"All I know of human nature was learned in a saloon before I was twenty," he would say. "I learned to distinguish between a laugh from the head and one from the heart. I gauged sincerity by the intonations of speech. . . I have since found that men and women in far places of the world and in different social strata are fundamentally the same as those I first met in my formative years."

Tully’s raw, staccato style in many ways provided the hard-boiled link between London’s "strenuous life" literature and Ernest Hemingway’s muscular prose. Like Hemingway, Tully wrote of rugged sorts in crisp, understated sentences. Like John Steinbeck, he was more interested in society’s outcasts than high society. Like Dashiell Hammett, he had a gift for depicting violence in horrifically realistic tones.

"My belief is that anything that has been lived should be written without equivocation," Tully said. Little wonder, therefore, that both Tully’s literary champion, writer-editor H.L. Mencken, and The New York Times compared him to Gorky. By 1932, George Jean Nathan -- dean of Broadway critics and co-editor of "The American Mercury" -- was looking over America’s literary heavyweights and ranking Tully with Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, and Theodore Dreiser. Author and journalist Frank Scully was crediting Tully with being "the leader (and the founder) of the hard-boiled school of writing."

character sketches

A Dozen and One (1943) (Hollywood: Murray & Gee, Inc.)

read Tully's profile of Clark Gable

a play:

Twenty Below (1927) play (London: Robert Holden & Co. Ltd.)

a pamphlet:

A Man of the New School (a 1931 pamphlet by Tully published by the Greater Hotel Gibson in Cincinnati)

Major Adaptations of Books by Jim Tully

Outside Looking In by Maxwell Anderson (play version of "Beggars of Life," produced in New York in 1925 with Charles Bickford and James Cagney in role based on Tully)

Jim Cagney and Jim Tully. Cagney's first major role came in Maxwell Anderson's 1925 adaptation of Beggars of Life, "Outside Looking In," which ran on Broadway for about four months. Cagney played Little Red, the character based on Tully.

Jarnegan by Charles Beahan and Garrett Fort (play version of Tully’s novel, produced in New York in 1928 with Richard Bennett in the title role)

Beggars of Life by Benjamin Glazer (film version of Tully’s book, directed by William Wellman and released by Paramount Pictures in 1928; it stars Richard Arlen, Louise Brooks and Wallace Beery)

Laughter in Hell (film version of Tully’s novel, starring Pat O’Brien and released by Universal Pictures in 1932)

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