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.[1] 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).