| Our Spring 1999 issue featured a story about a boxing cut-man, “The Monkey Look.” It was F. X. Toole's first time in print. He was 69 at the time. A New York agent saw the story and contacted Toole and sold his collection of stories, Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner, to Ecco Press.
Now Toole’s stories have inspired Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby.
Unfortunately, Toole did not live to see the Hollywood dramatization of his stories nor the film’s Oscar triumph; he died in 2002.
Read the beginning of “The Monkey Look” from our Spring 1999 issue.
A second story by F.X. Toole, “The University of Missouri," appeared in ZYZZYVA Winter 2001.
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