Beggars of Life (Forgotten Classics)

Jim Tully was seventeen, broke, and already done with the life the world had planned for him. Beggars of Life is the memoir he wrote about what came next, and a hundred years later, it still hits harder than most books published this week.





FORGOTTEN CLASSICS SERIES | COLLECTOR'S EDITION

First published 1924. The book that inspired the classic Paramount film starring Louise Brooks.

The book that put Jim Tully on the map has been out of reach for a century. Not anymore.

Beggars of Life is one of the great forgotten memoirs of American literature. First published in 1924, it is the true account of Jim Tully's years riding freight trains across a country that had no use for him, sleeping in hobo jungles, outrunning railroad detectives, nearly dying of typhoid in a cattle car, and meeting the full cast of America's discarded underclass. It is raw, funny, and completely unsentimental. It reads like nothing else from its era.

The book was scandalous enough to be adapted for the stage, then for a 1928 Paramount film starring Louise Brooks, Richard Arlen, and Wallace Beery. Then it quietly disappeared. For most readers today, original copies exist only behind glass in rare book rooms.

This collector's edition brings it back in a form worthy of the book itself. Twenty new illustrations bring Tully's world to life across the pages. The cloth hardcover is finished with foil detailing on the front cover, custom endpapers, and a ribbon marker, because a book you'll want to read more than once deserves to be built that way.