Jim Tully was an American vagabond, pugilist, and writer. He enjoyed critical and commercial success as a writer in the 1920s and 1930s. Born near St. Marys, Ohio, to James Dennis and Bridget Marie Lawler Tully, an Irish immigrant ditch-digger and his wife, Tully enjoyed a relatively happy but impoverished childhood until the death of his mother in 1892. Unable to care for him, his father sent him to an orphanage in Cincinnati. He remained there for six years. What further education he acquired came in the hobo camps, boxcars, railroad yards, and public libraries scattered across the country.