1927. Tully, novelist, journalist, lecturer, Hollywood columnist of the 1920s and 30s, road kid, chainmaker, boxer, circus handyman, tree surgeon; an inheritor of the tradition of the literary wanderer, and father of another, the school of hard-boiled writing. A quote in the beginning of the book by George Jean Nathan reads, If there is a writer in America today who can lay hold of mean people and mean lives and tear their mean hearts out with more appalling realism, his work is unknown to me. One of his autobiographical works, Circus Parade is a series of his none too happy and often ironical incidents with a circus.