Polio: An American Story is a book by David M. Oshinsky, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, which documents the polio epidemic in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s and the race to find a cure, which was eventually developed in the 1950s by medical researcher Jonas Salk. It was published in 2005 by the Oxford University Press and won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for History and the 2005 .