RE: RARA-AVIS: More on Tully

From: Robison Michael R CNIN ( Robison_M@crane.navy.mil)
Date: 31 Oct 2002


Tully's best known work is BEGGARS OF LIFE (1924), which was subtitled by the publisher "A Hobo Autobiography." Tully wrote that this was misleading as it was "a compilation of dramatic episodes in the life of a youthful vagabond."

He also said he was a "road-kid, and not in the strict sense if the word, a hobo." As examples of other later famous road-kids, he mentions the boxers Jack Dempsey, Kid McCoy and Stanley Ketchell and writers Jack London and Josiah Flynt. Decades later, Charles Willeford would be another road-kid who became a writer.

************ I'm not sure if Richard or Jim wrote this. Good stuff. The hobo influence on the hardboiled genre is an interesting connection. There's an essay in Madden's TOUGH GUY WRITERS OF THE THIRTIES which specifically points to hobos as the origin of the hardboiled P.I., and I've been wanting to read Orwell's DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON and London's PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS for a while. Sounds like maybe I should put Tully's book on my list.

miker

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