Finally, weary of the road, he arrived in Kent, Ohio, where he worked as a chain maker, professional boxer, and tree surgeon.

As a free-lancer he was not constrained by the studios and wrote about Hollywood celebrities (including Charlie Chaplin, for whom he had worked) in ways that they did not always find agreeable.

While some of the more graphic books ran afoul of the censors,[1] they also garnered both commercial success and critical acclaim from, among others, H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan, and Rupert Hughes, who wrote that Tully "has fathered the school of hard-boiled writing so zealously cultivated by Ernest Hemingway and lesser luminaries."

Beggars of Life, a silent film starring Louise Brooks based on Tully's memoir of the same name and its play adaptation, Outside Looking In, by Maxwell Anderson, was released in 1928.

Tully later had two additional marriages, to Marna, Margaret Rider Myers in 1925, and finally to Myrtle Zwetow on June 28, 1933, in Ventura, California.