author
Jim Tully
1886–1947
Best known for turning a hard, restless life into vivid prose, this American writer brought the worlds of hoboes, boxers, and outsiders onto the page with unusual grit and sympathy. His books found a wide audience in the 1920s and 1930s, even though his path to literary success was anything but ordinary.
1 Audiobook
Gods of the lightning; Outside looking in
by Maxwell Anderson, Harold (George Harold) Hickerson, Jim Tully
About the author
Born near St. Marys, Ohio, in 1886, Jim Tully grew up in poverty and lost his mother as a child. He spent part of his youth in an orphanage, later drifted across the country, and worked a string of rough jobs while educating himself through constant reading. That experience shaped the voice that would define his writing: direct, unsentimental, and deeply interested in people living on society's edges.
Tully became known as a novelist, memoirist, and journalist whose work drew on the lives of tramps, laborers, fighters, and other outsiders. He achieved both critical and commercial success in the 1920s and 1930s, and his books helped bring working-class and wandering American life into mainstream literature.
He died in 1947, but his reputation has endured as that of a fiercely original American voice. Readers still come to his work for its toughness, energy, and firsthand feel for lives that many writers of his time ignored.