John R. Tunis - Legacy

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." This may seem surprising considering that his New York Times obituary referred to him as a man who "helped educate a whole generation of Americans". Perhaps seen in light of Tunis' distrust of professional athletics, it can be understood. Though he may have felt his message against the commercialization of sports was ignored, there are those who cite Tunis as having made a lasting impact in publishing and to them personally and professionally.

In literature Tunis' contributions have sometimes been direct. His baseball books, especially The Kid from Tomkinsville, have been cited as one source of inspiration for Bernard Malamud's book The Natural, about baseball star Roy Hobbs. Among other similarities, both Hobbs and Tucker started as pitchers but, thanks to accidents, ended up as outfielders and power-hitters. It has been suggested by Michele Schiavone in her study of Tunis' influence on Malamud and Roth that, as an early fan of the Dodgers, Malamud was familiar with Tunis' books and borrowed from them, "consciously or not". 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. And in what D. G. Myers in Best Baseball Books Ever called "one of the best pieces of (literary) criticism ever written", 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", and his realization of the "tragic underside to the American Dream".

A number of sportscasters, writers and journalists point to Tunis' books as inspiration for their careers. Tunis is mentioned by author Daniel Okrent in the dedication for The Ultimate Baseball Book as one of "those responsible for the earliest roots of this project". 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".

In The Continuum Encyclopedia of Children's Literature Nancy Horton called Tunis "the forefather of the genre of young adult sports fiction". 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.

In his tribute to the writer, Bernard Hayes said "Tunis has probably made good readers of millions of young people." 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.