Books by David Levering Lewis
W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography 1868-1963
by David Levering Lewis
🏆 Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
The second volume in a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the leading figure of the civil rights movement in America, by the historian David Levering Lewis. The first volume, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, won in 1994. Levering Lewis told PBS: "I stopped volume one... at the end of World War I, when Dubois was midstream in his life. He would live, until 1963, a life as full as the years antecedent to the time that I interrupted. I wanted to take Dubois out of [...] quite focused concerns about one group of people, and put him in a larger forum in which he becomes concerned about equality and economic justice for people of all colors everywhere."
“It’s the history I recommend to friends and students seeking a readable introduction to Harlem’s rise as ‘the Negro Capital of the World.’ Lewis remains the least tediously detached writer on the Renaissance ever to have wielded a thick footnote. Only When Harlem Was in Vogue could describe Marcus Garvey’s ideology as a “farrago of Booker Washington and Mussolini,” and only there could this description seem well-founded.” Read more...
The best books on The Harlem Renaissance
William J. Maxwell, Literary Scholar
Interviews where books by David Levering Lewis were recommended
The best books on The Harlem Renaissance, recommended by William J. Maxwell
It was a golden age for American culture, a flourishing of Black literature, music and the arts that exploded in the 1910s and lasted through to the Great Depression. It was focused on Harlem, the area of New York City above Central Park, but its origins and its impact were much, much broader. William J. Maxwell, Professor of English and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, recommends some of the best books on the Harlem Renaissance.
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1
Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
by Jason Roberts -
2
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom
by Ilyon Woo -
3
King: A Life
by Jonathan Eig -
4
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
by Beverly Gage -
5
Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South
by Winfred Rembert -
6
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
by Les Payne & Tamara Payne
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies
The Pulitzer Prize for Biography is awarded annually to “a distinguished and appropriately documented” biography by an author from or based in the United States. The authors of winning books receive $15,000, and join a starry pantheon of great American writers. Here, we’ve put together a summary of all the Pulitzer-winning biographies since the turn of the millennium.
