T.J. Stiles

T.J. Stiles is an American author and biographer known for his deeply researched studies of major figures in American history. He graduated from Carleton College and received an M.A. from Columbia University. His biography Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (2002) established him as a leading historian of the post-Civil War era. His second major biography, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (2009), won both the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 2010, making him one of a small number of authors to have won both prizes. The book offered a sweeping portrait of the railroad baron and the transformation of American capitalism. Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America (2015) won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History. In it, Stiles examined the life of General George Armstrong Custer not as a military caricature but as a man shaped by — and at odds with — the rapid modernization of post-Civil War America. The biography was hailed for its psychological depth and historical breadth. Stiles is a member of the Society of American Historians and a former Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Berkeley, California.