Bücher von Jim Tully

Blood on the Moon (1931) is Tully's fifth and final book in what he called his Underworld Edition-a series of autobiographical books focusing on different aspects of his childhood and youth. As the concluding book in the series, Tully looks back at subjects from the previous four Underworld books. There are hobo stories that would have fit well in Beggars of Life, there are Hughie Tully's stories that could have come from Shanty Irish, the Great Slavinsky would have been at home in Circus Parade, and there are grifters who could have plied their trade in Shadows of Men. There's also the brutal description of the 1906 World Lightweight title fight between Joe Gans and Battling Nelson. The fight went an incredible 42 rounds in 100 degree heat and Tully's description is as tough and vicious as anything that would later appear in Tully's classic boxing novel, The Bruiser. And in the chapter "Ladies in the Parlor," Tully describes the women who work in a brothel with sympathy but without romanticizing them.

The idea of men in jail had interested Jim Tully for years, going back to his youthful reading of Dostoyevsky's The House of the Dead and his own time in jail and on a work crew. It was to this subject that he turned with Shadows of Men. He had already written about drifters and the underworld in Beggars of Life and Circus Parade, but those episodes were, respectively, part of his larger story of life as a road kid and working for a small-time circus. Shadows of Men would be different. Its first eighteen chapters focused exclusively on the brutal aspects of his road years. These chapters are set in hobo camps, boxcars, railroad yards, jails, and cotton fields. As Tully wrote in the foreword to a later book, Blood on the Moon, Shadows of Men, "contains the tribulations, vagaries and hallucinations of men in jail." Shadows of Men, unsparing in its depiction of bleak people and places at cruel edges of the American landscape, was the book that cemented that reputation.

Circus Parade originally published in 1927, presents the sordid but albeit fascinating side of life traveling with a small-time circus life during the 1920s in America. From "The Moss-Haired Girl" to "Whiteface" the clown, Tully paints a vivid picture of each of these troubled characters that make up his daily experience in the circus. Circus Parade was one of Tully's most successful books, both commercially and critically. This is by no means a romantic story about a boy joining the circus. Tully knows too well its seamier side. Instead, he paints a picture of life at the edges-earthy, wolfish, and brutal. Fans of Jack London, Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, Charles Bukowski, and hard-boiled writers of the 1930s will find a kindred spirit in Jim Tully.

After killing her treacherous step-father, a girl tries to escape the country with a young vagabond. She dresses as a boy, they hop freight trains, quarrel with a group of hobos, and steal a car in their attempt to escape the police and reach Canada.A bestseller in 1924, in this vivid piece of outlaw history Jim Tully takes us across the seamy underbelly of pre-WWI America on freight trains, and inside hobo jungles and brothels while narrowly averting the cops. The author chose 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.