John R. Tunis

John Roberts Tunis was born December 7, 1889, to John Arthur and Caroline Greene Roberts Tunis, a teacher, in Boston, Massachusetts. John Arthur came from a well-to-do family, which he upset by leaving the Episcopalian church to become a Unitarian minister. His family disowned him when he married Caroline, the daughter of a waiter. When Tunis was seven and his brother Robert five their father died of Bright's disease; no one from the Tunis side of the family attended the funeral. After his death their mother taught at Brearley School for girls in Manhattan, later moving the family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she ran a boarding house. Tunis' maternal grandfather encouraged the brothers to take an interest in baseball. Two of young Tunis' heroes were Boston Nationals' baseball players Billy Hamilton and Fred Tenney. At age fourteen Tunis and his brother, too poor to pay the admission price, managed to watch a Davis Cup tennis match by climbing on top of a brewery wagon outside the courts. On February 19, 1918, Tunis married Lucy Rogers in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They did not have any children. ==Early career==

Freelance writing and sportscasting In 1921 the couple went to Europe where Tunis freelanced as a sports writer for American publications and played in some tennis tournaments on the Riviera, including a match against King Gustaf V of Sweden, who was 70 at the time. Tunis also played a doubles match against the French women's champion Suzanne Lenglen. Returning to the U.S. at the end of the summer, he dropped in on former Harvard classmate Lawrence Winship, the Sunday editor of The Boston Globe. When Winship learned that Tunis actually knew the flamboyant Lenglen, he insisted he write an article about her for the Globe before leaving the building. The pressure of that deadline caused him such anxiety that after half an hour of struggle he went to the building's fire escape, "leaned over the railing, and threw up. I'll never forget it. I wiped my face with copy paper. But I did the story." Working six days a week and taking the seventh to play tennis, At the same time, Tunis worked as a sport announcer, including commentating for tennis events for NBC. He was part of the first trans-Atlantic sports broadcast, a Davis Cup match from France in 1932. In 1934 Tunis announced the first broadcast of the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament to a U.S. audience. According to Anita Silvey in ''Children's Books and Their Creators'', between broadcasting and journalism Tunis became a "household name". Novels and sports criticism Tunis' first novel, American Girl, appeared in 1930. An unflattering and thinly veiled fictionalization of tennis star Helen Wills Moody, it became the basis for the 1951 movie Hard, Fast and Beautiful. It turned out to be the only one of Tunis' novels to be published for adults. In 1936, on the 25th anniversary of his graduation from Harvard, Tunis wrote Was College Worthwhile?, a condemnation of the Ivy League school and of his classmates that became a best seller. Jerome Holtzman, in No Cheering in the Press Box, calls it "a searing assault on Harvard traditions". and "Education and Ethics" for the Journal of Higher Education. The 1920-1930s have been called the Golden Age of Sports, and Tunis was right in the middle of much of it as a commentator, writer, and athlete, but he often criticized what he saw. He disliked the way the media was covering sports and its players. In the 1920s some sports promoters bribed newspapers for favorable coverage, and he felt the media was glorifying the business and ignoring its problems. Tunis also believed that high salaries would destroy the pleasure and benefits sports brought the everyday player. attacking what he saw as the increasing commercialization of college football. The article became the center of a continuing controversy. A 2010 The Texas Observer cover story, titled The Golden Football: The University of Texas’ Bad Example, opens with a two-paragraph reference to Tunis' article, and concludes by referring the reader back to Tunis' 1928 description of college football as a "first-class octopus strangling the legitimate pursuits of educational institution[s]." "Who Owns Football?" appeared in Sports Story Magazine in 1931, in 2012 John Dinan's Sports in the Pulp Magazines called it "timeless". and Tunis did not consider himself a children's writer. It was also named a The Horn Book Magazine Fanfare Best Book for 1938. The following year Harcourt released the sequel, The Duke Decides, which covers Duke's senior year at Harvard. Duke's participation as part of the U.S. Olympic team in Germany allowed Tunis to highlight the growing totalitarianism in Europe. Iron Duke was Tunis' best selling novel and remains his most well known work. ==Later career==

. 1940s In 1940 Tunis received $200 from his publisher to visit the Dodgers' spring training camp in Clearwater, Florida. He then began work on his first baseball novel. Though his papers only list Tucker as "Number 36", they do say that, among others, "Gabby" Gus was based on Leo Durocher and Dave Leonard was inspired by Luke Sewell. Tucker's story continues in 1941's World Series. The next year Tunis took a break from baseball stories to release two novels that again received starred reviews from Kirkus. Million Miler, based on the life of TWA and U.S. Air Corps pilot Jack Zimmerman, was overshadowed by his other 1942 release, All American, called by Simon Certner in The English Journal "the most superb novel produced in its genre". All American centers on football star Ronald Perry, who in protest over anti-Semitic activity and guilt for his part in it, leaves his prep school to play football for the local public high school, which does not exactly welcome him. Perry ultimately adjusts and becomes accepted, leading his new team to a postseason playoff. However, the team is invited only if they agree not to bring their one African-American player. Initially Perry is the only one who objects to this, but his refusal eventually stirs other students and parents to protest as well. Kirkus Reviews said of Tunis' only football novel, "This is one of the BIG books of the Fall, and should not be pigeonholed for junior reading." It further praised the book for illustrating "the whole rounded picture of race and color problems facing young and old today". Sixty-eight years later D.G. Myers, in "About the Manliest Sport", his 2010 article for Commentary magazine, decries the lack of good novels about football, calling All American "the best of a bad harvest... No one is better at describing the action on the field", though Myers warns that "readers will find Tunis dated". With 1943's Keystone Kids, Tunis returned to his beloved Dodgers, again addressing anti-Semitism, this time as manager and shortstop Spike Russell struggles to get his brother, and the rest of the team, to accept star catcher Jocko Klein. Keystone Kids received the Child Study Association of America Golden Scroll Award as the "most challenging children's book of the year". The next Dodgers novel, Rookie of the Year, appeared in 1944. Manager Russell struggles with an arrogant new pitcher. The same year Yea! Wildcats! took Tunis, and the reader, to Indiana for high school basketball tournament season. Tunis actually visited Indiana for his research, living with a key player and his family during tournament season. Called by Ball Tales "Hoosiers four decades before Hoosiers", Coach Henderson returned the next year in A City for Lincoln, working with juvenile delinquents and eventually running for mayor. In both these books Tunis returns to a favorite theme noted by Ryan K. Anderson in his survey of Tunis' World War II era writings; that parents, administrators, gamblers and other adult fans "injected improper values" 1949 saw the publication of his next-to-last book about the Dodgers. Young Razzle is the story of veteran pitcher Razzle Nugent and his estranged rookie son, who reconcile during Razzle's final season of baseball. Ball Tales calls it "Tunis' most entertaining, if not profound, story." and Children Experience Literature said it was a "grimly realistic picture of warfare and its effect on both soldiers and civilians". According to the International Reading Association, while reading it "children may be helped to understand that history is always someone's interpretation... For in this story the author had the courage to admit that our men were sometimes less than brave in their desperate struggle to survive". Tunis' autobiography, A Measure of Independence, appeared in 1964. Ball Tales makes it "Highly recommended for anyone who aspires to be, or remain, a freelance writer". His Enemy, His Friend appeared in 1967. Tunis considered this second World War II book to be his best work. Opening with an Author's Note stating "This is a book about the conscience of a man", the story tells of a German sergeant, a convicted war criminal remembered by the French as the Butcher of Nogent-Plage, who returns to the area twenty years after the war's end, to play soccer. Literature IS... Collected Essays says the novel "lays bare man's age-old confusion between his inner conscience and the demands of his culture". 1970s and death In 1973 Tunis' final sports novel appeared. ''Boys' Life published an excerpt from Grand National and gave the book a positive review, calling it "exciting". Kirkus, however, found it "sentimental" and "tepid". The publication of Grand National'' brought Tunis' total number of juvenile novels to twenty-three. John R. Tunis, according to D. G. Myers "perhaps the greatest sports novelist of all time", died on February 4, 1975, in Boston, Massachusetts, survived by his wife, Lucy Rogers. His papers are held at Boston University. ==Themes==

Leonard Marcus in ''Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children's Literature'', says "Tunis's books were never only about sports", noting "the author's determination to offer his readers basic lessons about good citizenship and fair play, and a chance to reflect on such rarely discussed social issues as racial equality and anti-Semitism". A doctoral study at Oklahoma State University in 1996 analyzed all of Tunis' juvenile sports books. The predominant value found both in the books and their main characters was Courtesy/Fairness/Respect. The second most identified value was Compassion/Kindness. The study found that "the values are not portrayed didactically, as part of lessons, but rather as a natural part of the stories". In his book What Would Frank Merriwell Do?, Ryan Anderson also pointed out the recurring theme of fairness and sportsmanship over winning in both Tunis' fiction and non-fiction, saying "The common thread winding through all his writing became his dismay over the nation's tendency to value winning above common decency." In turning from primarily writing non-fiction for adults to juvenile fiction Tunis did not abandon his emphasis on values over victory, but it did give him an audience that seemed more willing to listen. Rather than emphasize winning, Tunis believed that values like hard work and perseverance could be taught through sports. The 1951 football brochure for the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology Athletic Scholarship committee cites Tunis, saying "The athletic department would like to feel that the existing program can do for the engineer what John Tunis had in mind when he said, 'The deep objective of games really is to train one’s reflex of purpose to develop a habit of keeping steadily at something you want until it is done. Many of Tunis' biggest heroes find themselves eventually brought low, like Roy Tucker in The Kid Comes Back, whose wartime service injury may have destroyed his career, or Iron Duke Jim Wellington at Harvard, ostracized and lonely, who perseveres by running track. The real victory is in the character's refusal to give up against long odds. "My heroes are the losers" he once said. "All my books have been in that vein. Every book I've ever written." Tunis also took on issues closer to home. He believed in the concept of "Democratic Sport", that games open to any person "regardless of ethnicity, class, or skill" promoted the values America needed, The 1942 Northwestern University radio program "Of Men and Books" featured All American in its episode titled "Children's Books and American Unity". ==Legacy==

By the 1970s Tunis felt his message had been ignored or misunderstood by most Americans, saying "Nobody has paid attention... There was a time when I expected to do some good. But that was a long while ago." Bruce Brooks' introduction to the 1987 edition of The Kid from Tomkinsville says that Tunis "obviously" inspired Mark Harris, author of Bang the Drum Slowly. The Kid from Tomkinsville is referenced by Nathan Zuckerman, the main character in Philip Roth's novel American Pastoral. For Zuckerman, Tunis' book and pitcher Roy Tucker become what Schiavone called "a template for Zuckerman's view of the Swede", Writer and editor Tad Richards says, "I remember telling my mother... 'When I grow up to be a writer, and people ask me about the greatest influence on my writing career, I'm going to say John R. Tunis. Among Tunis' many childhood fans are sports writer and children's author Thomas J. Dygard, Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin, journalist Charles Kuralt and football legend Johnny Unitas. New York Post columnist and editor Pete Hamill picked The Kid From Tomkinsville as one of his five favorite sports novels, writing that "virtually every sportswriter I know remembers reading it as a boy." In Partial Payment: Essays on Writers and Their Lives, literary critic Joseph Epstein devotes one chapter, "A Boy's Own Author", to Tunis. Epstein admits that re-reading many childhood favorites can be disappointing, but found upon revisiting Tunis that his books are "pretty serious, and I was utterly absorbed in them". His novels changed the way sports fiction was written, adding depth by addressing social themes and adolescent issues. Up until his time sports stories focused solely on the games, and treated the athletes as Horatio Alger stereotypes. His stories gave the games context and addressed the pressures and problems of growing up in the spotlight, moving sports from the realm of pulp magazines to serious fiction. His success with the juvenile audience helped change the publishing industry. Along with writers like Howard Pease, his books demonstrated to publishers that there was money to be made in targeting books for teenagers. His influence went beyond simply creating a market for young adult books. "In his attempt to link sports with the communities in which they are played, he broached some highly significant issues in the literature written for and about America's youth", according to John S. Simmons in John R. Tunis and the Sports Novels for Adolescents: A Little Ahead of His Time. Tunis never considered himself a writer of boys' books, insisting his stories could be read and enjoyed by adults. He felt that the word "juvenile" was an "odious... product of a merchandising age". Despite his dislike of the term, Tunis' novels helped create and shape the juvenile fiction book market. ==Bibliography==