Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author

The Making of the Vanderbilt Dynasty: Commodore Vanderbilt’s Conquest of Nineteenth Century High Society

T.J. Stiles is the author of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 2009 National Book Award for Nonfiction. His previous book, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (2002) won the Ambassador Book Award, the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship, and was a New York Times Notable Book. He has held the Gilder Lehrman Fellowship in American History at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, has taught nonfiction writing at Columbia University, and has served as adviser for the PBS series The American Experience. He has written for the New York Times Book Review, Smithsonian magazine, The Atlantic Online, the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon.com and other publications. He lives in the Presidio of San Francisco with his wife and son.