Beggars of Life : A Hobo Autobiography (NABAT)

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Summary: Forgotten Classic of the Hard-boiled Style Now Back in Print
Review: In this account of his years on the road, Jim Tully achieved a perfect marriage of pared down prose and marginal subjects that launched his career as one of the best paid, most popular nonfiction writers in America at the time. With Beggars of Life it's not hard to see why Tully was so popular: this ostensibly simple story about hoboing both illuminates the early 20th century (entirely from the view of the reject and the freak and the "punkgrafter") and also manages to speak to the jaded, bored punks of today. It's a surprisingly wild read; race riots, deformities, violence, sex, drinking, cop-bashing, election-fixing, and corruption erupt throughout. But they are portrayed with such a simple elegance and detachment-- perhaps this is why it has fallen down one of the many memory holes our country reserves for dissenting work. The AK Press edition features a lively introduction by late pulp-legend Charles Willeford. As Willeford argues, Tully deserves to take his place beside Hemingway as a founder of the uniquely American, hard-boiled style of prose.