Beggars of Life is Jim Tully’s 1924 hobo autobiography, a young Irish-American orphan’s first-person account of riding the rails through early-20th-century America, written in stripped-down vernacular prose credited as the seed of the hardboiled school. I’ve turned it into a full Book Freak Edition for the Deep Cuts reading club, and if you are a paid subscriber, you can download the ebook below.

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In 1930, the silent-film star John Gilbert walked into the Brown Derby on Wilshire Boulevard, found Jim Tully eating dinner, and tried to punch him in the face. Gilbert had read Tully’s profile of him in Vanity Fair two years earlier and reportedly thrown up. He came at the table swinging. He missed twice. Tully had spent his early twenties as a professional lightweight boxer on the Ohio carnival circuit. He knocked Gilbert unconscious with one uppercut and went back to his dinner.

Tully was born in 1886 in St. Marys, Ohio, the son of an Irish immigrant ditch-digger. His mother died when he was six. His father couldn’t feed the kids, so he sent young Jim to St. Joseph’s orphanage in Cincinnati. He stayed there for six years before running away at fourteen and starting to ride freight trains.

For the next six years he was a hobo. On the road he went by “Cincinnati Red,” for his red hair. He worked as a chain-maker, tree surgeon, and dishwasher in a Leadville mining camp, tramped when he could, and read every book he could get his hands on. He stole books from libraries when he couldn’t borrow them.

By his mid-twenties, he had landed in Los Angeles and started writing. In 1923, Charlie Chaplin hired him as a personal publicist and ghostwriter. The job ended badly. Chaplin found out that Tully had been secretly writing an unauthorized biography of him on the side and sued the publisher to block its publication. Tully turned to magazine work. He wrote for Vanity Fair, Esquire, and H.L. Mencken’s The American Mercury. He invented the Hollywood celebrity profile as a beat. Before Tully, magazine writing about movie stars was puff. Tully went after them with the same eye he turned on bindlestiffs and railroad bulls. He was called “the man Hollywood most loved to hate,” a title he loved.

Novelist Rupert Hughes (uncle of Howard Hughes), his mentor, wrote that Tully “fathered the school of hard-boiled writing so zealously cultivated by Ernest Hemingway and lesser luminaries.” Tully was writing his stripped-down boxcar prose years before Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises.

His books are all worth reading. Circus Parade (1927) covers a season with a traveling circus and was banned in Boston and Atlanta for obscenity. Shanty Irish (1928) is about his savage Ohio childhood. Jarnegan (1926) is a Hollywood novel that was adapted into a Broadway play. Blood on the Moon (1931) is the boxing memoir. Beggars of Life (1924) is his most famous, and a good place to start.

Core Principles

The road as education

Tully treated hobo life as a serious apprenticeship. “It may be recorded here that hoboes regard their chosen profession seriously. There is much to learn in the game and more to endure.” He learned how to ride freight without losing a limb, how to beg without being arrested, how to spot a railroad detective from two boxcars away, and how to survive a Midwestern winter sleeping in a sand-shed.

Beauty in the gutter

In the middle of describing a freight yard full of lice-ridden tramps, Tully stopped to notice a “feather-tossed robin perched on a wire fence along the tracks…it looked hopeless and woebegone — a strayed reveller who had left a warm climate too soon.” He said of his own years in the gutter: “If my clothing was lousy I watched clouds sailing across the moon and heard linnets chirping and larks singing.” This is the trick the hardboiled school inherited from him: flat reportage of brutal facts, with sudden flashes of lyric grace.

Books as the one thing worth stealing

Tully stole from libraries throughout the book and is unapologetic. He carried Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm with him for two weeks while tramping to Chicago. He stole Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in Colorado and spent days in a boxcar because he couldn’t put it down. The hobo is broke, lice-bitten, hungry, and devouring the great Russian novels.

No false ennoblement

Tully refused to romanticize the road. He shows you the punkgrafters who use children as begging tools, the dope fiends shooting water into their veins for the placebo of relief, the railroad bulls who shoot at men jumping trains, the prostitute he stole four dollars from while she was drunk. He does not soften any of it. But he also does not pretend that working in an Ohio factory was nobler than tramping. “Tramping in wild and windy places, without money, food, or shelter, was better for me than supinely bowing to any conventional decree of fate.”

Try It Now

1. Sit for ten minutes somewhere you usually pass through without looking (a bus stop, a coffee shop counter, an airport gate) and write a paragraph describing one stranger you can see, with the same physical specificity Tully gives Billy on page 12: leather patch over the empty red socket, fingers yellow from cigarettes, the swagger as he ran for the train. This is the discipline that made Tully a writer.
2. Take one activity you’ve been doing casually (cooking, gardening, your job, a side hustle) and treat it the way Tully treats hoboing: a serious profession with “much to learn in the game and more to endure.”
3. Pick a difficult book you’ve been avoiding and start reading. Tully read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment while sleeping on coke in a boxcar to Los Angeles.

Quote

“The road gave me one jewel beyond price, the leisure to read and dream. If it made me old and wearily wise at twenty, it gave me for companions the great minds of all the ages, who talked to me with royal words.”

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