This novelistic memoir impressed readers and reviewers with its remarkable vitality and honesty. Tully’s devotion to Mark Twain and Jack London taught him the importance of giving the reader a sense of place, and this he does brilliantly, again and again, throughout Beggars of Life. From the opening conversation on a railroad trestle, Beggars of Life rattles along like the Fast Flyer Virginia that Tully boards midway through the book. This is the book that defined Tully’s hard-boiled style and set the pattern for the twelve books that followed over the next two decades. Startling in its originality and intensity, Beggars of Life is a breakneck journey made while clinging to the lowest rungs of the social ladder.

A hard-edged mixture of hilarious and heartbreaking memories, Tully’s autobiographical Shanty Irish digs deep into the soil of his native Ohio to show what life was like in the late nineteenth century for a poor Irish-American family. Within the covers of this acclaimed work, we meet the author’s father, also named Jim Tully, “a gorilla built” ditchdigger whose stooped shoulders carry “the inherited burdens of a thousand dead Irish peasants.” We meet his mother, Biddy, a “woman of imagination” who “had all the moods of April.” We meet his uncle, ruthless John Lawler, who was tried, convicted, and sentenced to fifteen years in the Ohio penitentiary for stealing horses. And we meet his grandfather, Old Hughie Tully, “born with the gift of words”—“capable of turning death into an Irish wake and pouring liquor down the throat of the corpse.”

Based on his time as a circus laborer, Circus Parade presents the sordid side of small-time circus life. Tully’s use of fast-paced vignettes and unforgettable characters made this book one of his most successful, both commercially and critically. Among the cast is Cameron, the shifty circus owner; Lila, the lonely four-hundred-pound strong woman; and Blackie, an amoral drug addict.

Produced shortly before his death in 1911 and long since out of print, Tom L. Johnson’s autobiography provides a rare personal insight into the career and philosophy of one of the most prominent figures of the American Progressive Era. Influenced by the single tax proposals of Henry George, Johnson gave up a prosperous business career to become a reform politician. Elected first to the U.S. House of Representatives, he served as mayor of Cleveland from 1901 to 1909, instituting sweeping reforms. His championship of municipal ownership, professional management of city departments, and broad public involvement in government makes Johnson’s mayoral administration one of the most celebrated in Cleveland’s history, as well as a focal point for scholars studying the Progressive Era.

Raymond DeCapite’s second published novel, A Lost King, has been described by Kirkus Reviews as a “small masterpiece, so unique in spirit and style.” If the mood of The Coming of Fabrizze is joyous, that of A Lost King is somber. Each of DeCapite’s novels is original in its own way, perhaps inspired by different moods. Writing in the New York Times in 1961, Orville Prescott described Fabrizze as “an engaging modern folk tale so full of love and laughter and the joy of life that it charmed critics and numerous readers and was generally considered one of the most promising first novels of 1960.” He found DeCapite’s second novel, A Lost King, was a different sort of book than Fabrizze: “Fabrizze is an apologia for heroes; A Lost King is an apologia for dreamers. A more mature book, it deals with a more serious theme—the relationship of a father and son…a pathetic and perhaps tragic conflict of personalities.”

First published in 1960, The Coming of Fabrizze has been called by the New York Herald Tribune a “comic folklore festival about an Italian American colony in Cleveland, Ohio, back in the 1920s when all the land was a little slaphappy—and no one more so than these transplanted countrymen of the Medicis, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Christopher Columbus… and others whose hearts have belonged to Italia.” More a myth or a legend than a realistic novel or sociological novel, Fabrizze is a celebration of the working class and a heroic tale of an immigrant who succeeds by virtue of hard work and honesty. Author Raymond DeCapite’s characterizations of Italian Americans in Cleveland have been compared to the depictions of Armenian Americans in the early writing of William Saroyan, and Ann Ross of the New York Herald Tribune said that DeCapite’s “greatest achievement is his ability to achieve tenderness without sentimentality.”

Originally published in 1902 by Henry O. Harden’s newspaper publishing company, History of the 90th Ohio Volunteer Infantry tells its story through the soldiers’ personal letters, diary entries, and memoirs. Formed in response to Confederate maneuvers in Kentucky in 1862, this regiment was comprised of men from Fairfield, Fayette, Hocking, Perry, Pickaway, and Vinton counties. They served in the Civil War from 1862 to 1865 and spent much of their time in Tennessee bravely participating in such battles as Stones River, Tullahoma, Chickamauga, Resaca, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta, Franklin, and Nashville.