Biddy Brogan's Boy

0/5 ( ratings)

In this warm and enheartening story of a boy growing into manhood, overcoming with his adventurous, fighting spirit those obstacles that chance was to place in his way, there are all those qualities of humor, Irish imagination and poetical expressiveness that one expects from Jim Tully. Yet this is different from anything he has written before: it contains also his finest portrait of a woman, Biddy Brogan's daughter, Virginia. It opens in a small town in Ohio where the mother of these two is the wife of a day-laborer. Though she has been a teacher, the family now faces hard times, and tragedies occur- especially that of the arrest and imprisonment of their bold, swaggering uncle. A wonderfully glowing, vivid family life is presented, rich in human qualities and in the courage that the boy soon needs when he takes to the road. He never loses touch though, with Virginia, who comes to keep a boarding house with picturesque characters in Chicago. That is his only home and he always returns to it from his wanderings. He tells her everything, and she, simply by being what she is, keeps him straight and true when friends go wrong. [About the author] Circus hand, chainmaker, dishwasher, laborer, pugilist, traveling tree surgeon and tramp ? Jim Tully's early years gave him something richer than the raw material for his many novels. It is no accident that, seeing his aggressively square chin, the humorous brooding eyes, we still associate him with the rough life of a hobo and a fighter. Criss-crossing the continent, "riding the rods,' taking whatever work he could find, he knew all kinds of Americans: he never had to "discover," as so many writers did in the thirties, the "proletariat" -- their life was his by common circumstance. He became "an inveterate public library bum" reading Dostoieveki, Balzac, Twain at random as they captured his imagination. Without their full powers of expression, without academic training of any kind, he nevertheless shares with the great writers an understanding of those residual realities that are the common lot of men and women everywhere. As much as any American writer he has done what he set out to do: he has written honestly and with imagination about the people he knows best. Now, with twenty-five books published, novels and autobiographical works that have been translated into Russian, French and Scandinavian, a quarter century has passed since his years as a fighter. But he retains an inner core of resoluteness, a gusto and humanity that success has not blunted; rather, in Biddy Brogan's Boy, perspective and mature understanding have been added to that sense-sharpened, Celtic awareness of the poetry of living that was always his finest gift as a writer.