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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 ''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 Rivera. 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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「John R. Tunis」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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