John Roberts Tunis (December 7, 1889 – February 4, 1975), "the 'inventor' of the modern sports story", was an American writer and broadcaster. Known for his juvenile sports novels, Tunis also wrote short stories and non-fiction, including a weekly sports column for the New Yorker magazine. As a commentator Tunis was part of the first trans-Atlantic sports cast and the first broadcast of the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament to the United States.
After graduating from Harvard and serving in the Army during World War I, Tunis began his writing career freelancing for American sports magazines while playing tennis in the Riviera. For the next two decades he wrote short stories and articles about sports and education for magazines including Reader's Digest, The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. Tunis' work often protested the increasing professionalization of sports in America. He believed that amateur participation in sports taught values important for good citizenship like perseverance, fair play and equality, and that the emphasis on professional sports was turning America into a country of spectators. His sports books also tackled current social issues such as antisemitism and racial equality.
Though Tunis never considered himself a children's writer, all but one of his twenty-four books were published for juveniles; their success helped create the juvenile fiction book market in the 1940s. Books like Iron Duke (1938), All American (1942) and Keystone Kids (1943) were well received by readers and critics. Iron Duke received the New York Herald Tribune Spring Book Festival Award for best juvenile novel and was named a The Horn Book Magazine Best Book. The Child Study Association of America gave its Golden Scroll Award to Keystone Kids.
Tunis' eight-book baseball series about the Brooklyn Dodgers began with The Kid from Tomkinsville, a book often cited by sports writers and commentators as inspiring childhood reading. Phillip Roth used The Kid from Tomkinsville and its main character Roy Tucker in his book American Pastoral. It is also considered an influence for Bernard Malamud's The Natural and Mark Harris' Bang the Drum Slowly.
Early years 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. Tunis played tennis at Cambridge Latin School, then followed in his father's footsteps to Harvard where he competed in tennis and ran track. He graduated from Harvard with a B. A. in 1911, then got a job in a Newburyport, Massachusetts, cotton mill. Tunis became an officer in the U.S. Army, serving in France during World War I. 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." Between 1920 and 1940 Tunis freelanced for a number of major magazines, including Reader's Digest, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire, writing primarily on two topics: sports and education. He also covered sports for the New York Evening Post from 1925 to 1932 and had a weekly column in The New Yorker. According to Norman Cousins in Writing for Love or Money, Tunis was known for producing "fact-packed articles based upon research". Working six days a week and taking the seventh to play tennis, Tunis published over 2,000 articles and short stories, becoming one ofAmerica's premier sportswriters.
At the same time, Tunis worked as a sport announcer, including commentating for tennis events for NBC. By 1927 The Harvard Crimson felt comfortable calling him "a world's authority on tennis". 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.This according to Tunis. Some sources say the short story "The Mother of a Champion" was the source. 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". Throughout his career he continued to write about education, including the chapter "New Leaven on the Campus" for Democracy's Challenge to Education, 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. His essay "The Great God Football" appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1928, 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".
According to Ryan K. Anderson in Upon Further Review: Sports in American Literature, "By the 1940s, Tunis enjoyed a career based on the practice of criticizing those aspects of American culture that others took lightly"." He felt that the more organized sports became, the more they led to the glorification of athletes, turning the United States into a country of spectators. As much as he loved sports, his writings often tried to show the need for balance in personal and national life. At one point he declared "Sports is the great opium of the people. It has become an addiction. It has made them forget more important things."
As the Depression took its toll on magazine finances, Tunis began working on another novel, Iron Duke, the story of a small-town Iowa football star who struggles to fit in with his elite classmates at Harvard, and eventually finds strength through success as a runner. He wrote the book for adults, but Alfred Harcourt wanted to publish and market it for juveniles. This initially dismayed Tunis, partly because at that time the separate field of young adult fiction did not exist,Young-adult fiction is generally accepted as having appeared as a separate genre in the early 1940s, some experts pinpointing 1942 as its inaugural year. and Tunis did not consider himself a children's writer. He eventually agreed and in 1938 Harcourt, Brace published Iron Duke as a children's book. The novel won the New York Herald Tribune Spring Book Festival Award for best juvenile novel and opened a new arena for Tunis. Tunis' success with these books made him one of a handful of writers who helped establish the young-adult market as a separate field. Kirkus Reviews gave Iron Duke a starred review among "books of remarkable merit", its reviewer calling it "One of the best modern college stories I have read". 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. The Kid from Tomkinsville became the first in a series of eight books about the Brooklyn Dodgers. In it, Tunis introduced rookie pitcher Roy Tucker and his teammates: "Bones" Hathaway, "Razzle" Nugent and "Fat Stuff" Foster. Tunis says in a note at the beginning of the book that "all the characters in this book were drawn from real life." 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. Kirkus gave it another starred review, saying it "struck a new note". Tucker's story continues in 1941's World Series.