Jim Tully’s people and places are gone now. Tully himself is dead 50 years—which doesn’t help the career—and 10 of his 12 books are out of print. But 2008 could be Tully’s big year. Or 2009.

Tully’s been called the missing link between Jack London and Ernest Hemingway—but all you really have to do is open one of his books, and the people in them begin to shout as loudly as the man himself. Tully had to be heard.

Born in 1886, and packed off at age six to an orphanage, Tully rode the rails, then worked as a chainmaker, a boxer, a circus handyman and a tree surgeon before beginning to write. He was in his mid-30s before Emmett Lawler, his first, rather autobiographical, novel saw print.

“I had none of the illusions of youth,” Tully wrote—quoted by two men, Cleveland Plain Dealer television critic Mark Dawidziak and Ohio rare book dealer Paul Bauer, whose biography of him is slated for a 2008-2009 release by Kent State University Press.

“I knew that I would never become president of the United States,” Tully continued. “I came, on both sides, from drunken barbarians who groveled in superstition and were as illiterate as geese.” But these were his kind. Writing about them—then later, about celebrities—made Tully one of the country’s most famous writers of the 1920s and 1930s.

Now, slowly, he dawns on us again. In 2003, Nabat books reissued Tully’s most famous work, Beggars of Life, his story of life as a hobo. Two years later, Circus Parade followed. Bauer says in a telephone message that he and Dawidziak are readying three more Tully books for reprint on Kent State University Press.

The rise of a new career arc might have pleased Tully; he knew what it was to be down.

JIM TULLY’S WORKS CAN BE FOUND ON AMAZON.COM AND, WHEN AVAILABLE, AT ACRES OF BOOKS 240 LONG BEACH BLVD | LONG BEACH 90802 | ACRESOFBOOKS.COM | 562.436.6980

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