In 1887, Fulton relocated to New York where he joined the Pullman Palace Car Company as a porter in 1888.
Fulton’s earliest writing was done for the Wilmington Record, a black-owned newspaper whose editor solicited Fulton’s observations on the condition and activities of black people whom he encountered during his travels as a porter.
In 1892 these observations were published in a forty-five-page pamphlet entitled Recollections of a Sleeping Car Porter, in which Fulton used his pen name “Jack Thorne” for the first time.
Between 1903 and 1906, Fulton gained prominence in Brooklyn for his letters and articles, which were published in a number of New York newspapers.
Bits of verse, autobiographical sketches, and a number of “Pullman Porter Stories” testify to the varied purposes to which Fulton turned his pen at this time.
