Shadows of Men

The idea of men in jail had interested Jim Tully for years, going back to his youthful reading of Dostoyevsky's The House of the Dead and his own time in jail and on a work crew. It was to this subject that he turned with Shadows of Men. He had already written about drifters and the underworld in Beggars of Life and Circus Parade, but those episodes were, respectively, part of his larger story of life as a road kid and working for a small-time circus. Shadows of Men would be different. Its first eighteen chapters focused exclusively on the brutal aspects of his road years. These chapters are set in hobo camps, boxcars, railroad yards, jails, and cotton fields. As Tully wrote in the foreword to a later book, Blood on the Moon, Shadows of Men, "contains the tribulations, vagaries and hallucinations of men in jail." Shadows of Men, unsparing in its depiction of bleak people and places at cruel edges of the American landscape, was the book that cemented that reputation.

Jim Tully (June 3,1886-June 22, 1947) was an American writer who earned critical praise and commercial success in the 1920s and '30s. His rags-to-riches career may qualify him as the greatest long shot in American literature. Tully drifted and boxed his way from hardscrabble Ohio origins to the Hollywood dream factory. There he chiseled his experiences into a string of acclaimed books, parlaying their success into a career as a Hollywood reporter. He was more than once declared the "father of the hard-boiled" writing style.

Paul J. Bauer is a used & rare book dealer in Kent, Ohio. He is the co-author of Frazier Robinson's autobiography, "Catching Dreams: My Life in the Negro Baseball Leagues." Bauer also co- authored "Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler," the definitive biography of Tully, published in 2011 by Kent State University Press and in 2023 by Commonwealth Book Company.

Mark Dawidziak is the author or editor of 25 books, including "The Columbo Phile: A Casebook," "Mark My Words: Mark Twain on Writing," "Everything I Need to Know I Learned in The Twilight Zone" and "A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe." Dawidziak also co- authored "Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler," the definitive biography of Tully, published in 2011 by Kent State University Press and in 2023 by Commonwealth Book Company.