Opening paragraphs................

"Michael Curley came to America at age fourteen: he married at twenty-one; he died at thirty-four.  "No obituary marked his death," one historian writes, "and not even a death notice appeared in the Boston newspapers.  Michael Curley had arrived in Boston unnoticed, worked in Boston unnoticed, died in Boston unnoticed."  He bequeathed to his son a wedding ring, and in his unseasonal death, the shared privation of the leading Irish-American politicians of his era.  For Martin Lomasney, the longtime boss of Boston's West End; John F. Fitzgerald, Boston's mayor and John F. Kennedy's grandfather; David I. Walsh, Massachusetts' first Catholic governor and senator; Al Smith, the New York governor and Democratic presidential candidate; and the slightly younger John W. McCormack, the Boston congressman and Speaker of the House - all these men, each of whom would figure centrally in the different chapters of Curley's life, lost their fathers when they were between the ages of ten (Curley) and fourteen (Fitzgerald).  Their fathers worked themselves to death; they died from the way they were obliged to live.
-Jack Beatty, The Rascal King: The Life and Times
of James Michael Curley