James Tobin

James E. Tobin (born 1956) is an American author of books of popular history and biography, including Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II (Free Press, 1997), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the biography/autobiography category. Since 2006 he has been a professor of journalism at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His other books include To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight (Free Press 2003); Great Projects (Free Press 2001); and The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency (Simon & Schuster, 2013). In 2021, his retelling of the story of Roosevelt and polio for young-adult readers was published as Master of His Fate: Roosevelt's Rise from Polio to the Presidency (Henry Holt). In the same year, he published Sing to the Colors: A Writer Explores Two Centuries at the University of Michigan (University of Michigan Press, 2021), a collection of narratives about the history of his alma mater. With the syndicated cartoonist Dave Coverly, Tobin has also written two picture books for children, Sue MacDonald Had a Book (Henry Holt, 2009) and The Very Inappropriate Word (Henry Holt, 2013). Early life and education Tobin was born in Pontiac, Michigan, in 1956, and educated in the public schools of Birmingham, Michigan. At the University of Michigan, where he earned a B.A. with a major in history in 1978, he was co-editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, The Michigan Daily. He pursued graduate studies in history at Michigan, earning the Ph.D. in 1986. His doctoral dissertation, overseen by the American historian Sidney Fine, was "Why We Fight: Versions of the American Purpose in World War II," a study of interpretations of the U.S. war effort developed by, among others, President Franklin Roosevelt, the advertising industry, the filmmaker Frank Capra and the war correspondent Ernie Pyle.