Public Library's 25 Books to Remember, and a Best Book of the Year by Library Journal, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Bookpage, and the London Independent. It also won the English Speaking Union's Ambassador Book Award, the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship, the James-Younger Gang's Perry Award, and the Friends of the James Farm's John Newman Edwards Award. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt In 2009, after seven years of work, Stiles published his second biography The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). This massive study was the first comprehensive account of the life of "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, the nineteenth-century shipping and railroad mogul, financial backer of Vanderbilt University, and founder of the Gilded Age Vanderbilt dynasty. This book was also widely and very favorably reviewed. It went on to win the 2009 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. It was also named a New York Times Notable Book and one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, the Financial Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and other publications. Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America Stiles next released a biography of George Armstrong Custer, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), a study of the popular federal cavalry general in the American Civil War who famously died at the hands of Lakota, Cheyenne, and allied Native American forces in 1876. Writing in the Boston Globe, Matthew Price found it to be "a biography of stunning richness and sophistication . . . [that] turns the focus squarely on Custer and away from the grim terminus that has defined his legacy." Thomas Powers remarked in the New York Review of Books that Stiles's relegation of the Battle of Little Bighorn to the epilogue "is about the boldest purely literary decision I’ve seen in a long while, and the effect is startling." The book has been named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and for the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History. It received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History. It was also a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Fellowships and other awards Stiles is a member of the