John Roberts Tunis was a well-known and prolific author of juvenile sports fiction. http://www.uta.edu/english/tim/baseball/juv/tunis.html Tunis's work was unusual in that many of his books included socio-political themes,http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,650202230,00.html including war (notably World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 in his novel, His Enemy, His Friend) and racism

Racism

Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...

.

Tunis was born the son of a Unitarian

Unitarianism

Unitarianism is a Christian theological movement, named for its understanding of God as one person, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism which defines God as three persons coexisting consubstantially as one in being....

 minister, who died when he was six years old. In 1911 he graduated from Harvard, where he was a member of the tennis

Tennis

Tennis is a sport usually played between two players or between two teams of two players each . Each player uses a racket that is strung to strike a hollow rubber ball covered with felt over a net into the opponent's court. Tennis is an Olympic sport and is played at all levels of society at all...

 team, and went on to study law at Boston University

Boston University

Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...

. In World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

 he served in the U.S. Army in France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, rising to second lieutenant. Prior to his fiction career, Tunis reported on sports for the New York Evening Post and later covered tennis for NBC radio, including the first U.S. broadcast from Wimbledon

The Championships, Wimbledon

The Championships, Wimbledon, or simply Wimbledon , is the oldest tennis tournament in the world, considered by many to be the most prestigious. It has been held at the All England Club in Wimbledon, London since 1877. It is one of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments, the other three Majors...

. http://www.elliemik.com/tunis.html

Nine of Tunis's novels were about baseball

Baseball

Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...

 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9762080, most of them dealing with the triumphs and travails of the Brooklyn Dodgers. His most famous creation was Roy Tucker, a pitching phenom who injured his elbow and then fought his way back into baseball as an outfielder, and Tunis surrounded Tucker with a host of supporting players - "Bones" Hathaway, "Razzle" Nugent, "Fat Stuff" Foster - who vividly evoked baseball's golden age. It has been said that Tunis's baseball books are "not only the best sports fiction for 10-to-14 year-olds ever written, they are among the best sports fiction - period." http://www.headbutler.com/books/the_kid.asp Pete Hamill

Pete Hamill

Pete Hamill is an American journalist, novelist, essayist, editor and educator. Widely traveled and having written on a broad range of topics, he is perhaps best known for his career as a New York City journalist, as "the author of columns that sought to capture the particular flavors of New York...

picked The Kid From Tomkinsville, the first Tunis book to feature Tucker, as one of his five favorite sports novels, writing that "virtually every sportswriter I know remembers reading it as a boy." http://www.salon.com/books/bag/1999/05/03/sports/index.html

Discovering Tunis's novels is referred to as a moment of childhood revelation about the cruel nature of the universe for Nathan Zuckerman, the narrator of Philip Roth's novel American Pastoral (1997).

Partial List of Novels by John Tunis

Baseball

• The Kid from Tomkinsville
• The Kid Comes Back
• World Series
• Highpockets
• Rookie of the Year
• Keystone Kids
• Schoolboy Johnson
• Young Razzle

Football

• All American

Basketball

• Go Team Go
• Yea Wildcats
• A City for Lincoln

Track and Field

• Iron Duke
• The Duke Decides

Soccer

• His Enemy His Friend

Other titles

• A Measure of Independence
• Champion's Choice (Women's Tennis)
• Grand National
• Million Miler
• Buddy and the Old Pro
• Other Side of the Fence
• American Girl
• Silence over Dunkerque (WW2)
• Son of the Valley