Jerome Tuccille

A Portrait of Hemingway as a Young Man: Romping Through Paris in the 1920s
A PORTRAIT OF HEMINGWAY AS A YOUNG MAN is a partly satirical, partly serious homage to the men and women whom many regard as perhaps the greatest literary generation in modern times. Like other writers of my generation, and the generation that came before me, I grew up in the shadows of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, and other great writers of the early twentieth century. I have written this book with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, but also with great respect and admiration for Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Morley Callaghan, and other truly fine writers of perhaps the most glamorous era in twentieth-century literature. I have wanted to write this book for some time for therapeutic as well as literary reasons. And now it is done. God bless writers all over the world. And God bless writers who bend themselves to their craft because to spend their lives doing anything else is nothing less than the height of folly and self-destruction.

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Adventures in Heaven and Hell: a Walk on the Wild Side
“A would-be Hemingway traces the spiritual and sexual odyssey of his early years,” explains Kirkus Reviews. “In Adventures in Heaven and Hell, Tuccille, denounced as a heretic by the dean of a Catholic college, skillfully weaves together details from his Italian-American upbringing in the Bronx with his globetrotting in the late 1950s and early ’60s. The author renounces Catholicism and its educational institutions, ‘presided over by social misfits, sexual deviants, and intellectual dullards in long, black dresses’… This book generally skillful and engagingly detailed, but accenting the carnal more than the spiritual.”

Gallery of Fools: The True Story of a Celebrated Manhattan Art Theft
The story told in this book is based on events that took place more than thirty years ago. The theft of eight priceless paintings took place as told; they were hidden in my father’s cellar in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx for about two years until my wife and I removed them. My cousin and his partner were arrested for their roles in the crime. I have taken some fictional liberties in the reconstruction of dialogue that occurred back in the 1970s and in the invention of details that most likely happened during breaks in the main action of the story.

After returning from a vacation in California with his wife and family, the narrator is reluctantly drawn into a crime involving the theft of eight Impressionist masterpieces from a Manhattan art gallery, perpetrated by members of his family, and escapes at the end only by the grace of a benevolent deity. In June 2007, one of the paintings, Monet’s “Nympheas,” sold at auction in London for $36 million. The narrator tries to find redemption in a quixotic political campaign when he runs for Governor of New York, only to have his life unravel before his eyes in a way he could not have foreseen. The failure of his campaign and the arrest of members of his family for their involvement in the crime lead to near financial ruin and the destruction of his marriage. In the end, he gets back on his feet, reunites with his wife, and finds his way back onto a path toward redemption. An updated edition is scheduled for release in 2010.

It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand
This edition of It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand contains much of the text that appeared in the original edition—revised and edited to conform to modern style—plus new chapters dealing with events that took place after the book was first published. Some of the new material deals with my campaign for Governor of New York as the Free Libertarian Party candidate, a discussion of events that transpired on the American political scene after that benighted campaign, plus thoughts on my current political and spiritual leanings. The perennial success of It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand has startled no one more than me. Sales started slowly, then began to pick up over the years, until the book became an underground classic that has gained readership over the decades. It should be read as political memoir, a first-hand account of a political movement, mostly fact, but with fictional elements and hyperbole added for effect. A reviewer once said that most memoirs are neither fact nor fiction; they are the truth as the author remembers it. So it is with It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand.

Gallo Be Thy Name
This book was first published in 2009 and is the recipient of several awards. The Gallos rose from abject poverty in the early 1900s to create the most successful wine company in the world, the Gallo family used hard work, strong values—and crime—to find their success. In Gallo Be Thy Name, biographer Jerome Tuccille takes readers through Prohibition and the Great Depression, following the Gallos as they ride the turbulent currents of history to triumph. But beneath the shiny steel surface of the Ernest & Julio Gallo Winery swirl rumors of murder and a sweeping story of passion and power. A new edition will be published by Blue Mustang Press in 2010.

Trump
“Trump reads like a movie script. This unauthorized biography is compelling reading. For those curious about the inside machinations of Trump’s peculiar, sometimes glamorous world, this book is ideal.”

Kingdom: The Story of the Hunts of Texas
“Tuccille is a master chronicler of events. He also brings in a kaleidoscope of American History during the earlier decades of this century that both delights and engrosses the reader.”