John Augustine McNulty was born on November 1, 1895 in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was the son of John McNulty, a bricklayer, and Mary Theresa Carty. Both parents came from the west of Ireland. After her husband died in 1898, McNulty's mother opened a small candy and tobacco store, and the family lived in the rooms behind. McNulty recalled the store as a neighborhood social center, and it was there he learned to relish storytelling and talk.
McNulty graduated from high school in 1912 and, after various jobs including work on the Lawrence Tribune, in 1913 entered Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts The following year he transferred to Colby College in Waterville, Me. , but left without a degree to join the army. He fought in France with the Ninth Infantry, rose to the rank of sergeant, was wounded at Fère-en-Tardenois, and spent a year in an army hospital at Lakewood, N. J. McNulty moved to New York in 1921, studying at Columbia University by day and working for the Associated Press by night.
McNulty left the Associated Press for the New York Post but by 1923 was out of work because of heavy drinking and temperamental behavior. He reluctantly left New York to work for the Ohio State Journal in Columbus. There he met James Thurber, then a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch, and they became lifelong friends. Thurber introduced McNulty to Donia Williamson, whom he married in 1924. For a time his career prospered and his reputation for humorous, graceful writing soared. He became editor of the drama page of the Columbus Citizen and made numerous friends in show business, but his fondness for saloons led to the neglect of duty. Thurber recalled one occasion on which McNulty was fired. Next day he returned to the city room and said meekly, "I guess since I was fired, there is a vacancy. " He was told there was. "Then I'd like to apply for the job. " He got it. When forgiveness finally ran out, McNulty moved to the Pittsburgh Press and thence to a job as a speech writer for Ohio Governor George White. About 1934, at the urging of Thurber, McNulty returned to New York. He was hired by the New Yorker, but, after about a year, felt uneasy in its atmosphere and returned to newspapers. As a rewrite man for the New York Mirror and later the New York Daily News, McNulty was known for the skill and speed with which he transformed reporters' notes into finished stories. He stopped drinking and, proud of his sobriety, became a listener and observer of saloon life. During free time at the News in 1941, McNulty wrote the story that launched his career in fiction, "Atheist Hit by a Truck". The editor, Harold Ross, liked the story greatly, and McNulty followed it with a dozen more. He was given a staff writer's contract with the magazine and over the next decade continued to write much of his best material about the smaller events of city life. His first collection of such pieces, Third Avenue, New York, was published in 1946. In 1943, McNulty left the News to write scripts for the "March of Time" radio news program. Then, succumbing to a lucrative offer from Paramount Studios, he went to Hollywood in 1945.
He finished his first rewrite of a film script at city room speed, appalling his fellow writers, who threatened to lock him up if he did not slow down. Unhappy in Hollywood and unsuited to film writing, McNulty returned to New York City in 1946. He wrote a sports column for the newspaper PM that became a personal column called "Easy Does It. " At the same time, he wrote "casuals" and "Reporter at Large" pieces for the New Yorker. After a heart attack in 1947, he wrote an account of his stay in Bellevue Hospital, one of his best long pieces. He died at his summer home in Wakefield, R. I. The World of John McNulty, a collection of his best writing, came out in 1957 and was extensively reviewed.
The reviewers especially noted McNulty's perceptive observation and his keen and accurate ear for language. Virtually everyone who knew McNulty seems to have felt his personal magnetism. Many of McNulty's stories originated in a Third Avenue saloon run by Tim Costello, whose friendship McNulty shared with Thurber and many other writers. Never an intellectual, McNulty avoided the word "art" as embarrassing and pretentious. He loved language and regarded it with the eye of a perfectionist. He often reread H. L. Mencken's The American Language and greatly admired the work of E. B. White and Ring Lardner, but wit and satire simply did not interest him. He was one of the very few American story writers of the twentieth century whose skill was balanced by an inexhaustible generosity of feeling. Gifted in many of the same ways as Ernest Hemingway, Lardner, and Dorothy Parker all masters of the American vernacular McNulty never fell into irony or despair, never hardened under his experience of human suffering or lost his delight in mankind.
Quotes from others about the person
Thurber wrote about McNulty: "Nobody who knew McNulty . .. could ever have confused him for a moment with anybody else. His presence in a room was as special as the way he put words down on paper. "
McNulty was twice married. His first marriage having ended in divorce, McNulty was married on September 24, 1945, to Faith Corrigan Fair, whom he had met at the Daily News. They had one son.
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