Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Levering Lewis was born on May 25, 1936 in Little Rock, Arkansas. His father, Yale educated theologian John Henry Lewis, Sr., was the principal of Paul Laurence Dunbar High School and his mother was a high school math teacher. After attending parochial school in Little Rock, Lewis went to Wilberforce Preparatory School and Xenia High School, both in Ohio. Moving to Atlanta, Georgia, Lewis attended Booker T. Washington High School until he was admitted to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee on a four-year Ford Foundation Early Entrants scholarship. Graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Fisk University in 1956, Lewis then attended the University of Michigan Law School, but eventually earned his M.A. degree in history from Columbia University in 1959. He earned his Ph.D. degree in modern European and French history from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1962.

After serving in the United States Army, Lewis lectured on medieval history at the University of Ghana in 1963. Lewis taught at Howard University, Cornell University, the University of Notre Dame, Harvard University and the University of California - San Diego before joining Rutgers University in 1985 as the Martin Luther King, Jr., Professor of History. In 2003, Lewis was appointed Julius Silver University Professor and Professor of History at New York University.

Winner of two Pulitzer Prizezs for his biographies of W.E.B. DuBois, Lewis also won the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize. He has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He is also a trustee of the National Humanities Center, commissioner of the National Portrait Gallery, and a former senator of Phi Beta Kappa. A former president of the Society of American Historians (2002-2003), Lewis sits on the board of the NAACP's The Crisis magazine.

God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215
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Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton (January 21, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0393064727
ISBN-13: 978-0393064728
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.7 inches

The Souls of Black Folk
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by W.E.B. DuBois (Author), David Levering Lewis (Introduction)

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Modern Library; Centenary Ed edition (January 7, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375509119
ISBN-13: 978-0375509117
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches

When Harlem Was in Vogue
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Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (June 1, 1997)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0140263349
ISBN-13: 978-0140263343
Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches

W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963
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by David Levering Lewis

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

ISBN: 0805025340
Format: Hardcover, 715pp
Pub. Date: September 2000
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated

In this final, magisterial volume, fifteen years in the research and writing, the Pulitzer Prize -- winning biographer David Levering Lewis stunningly re-creates the second half of W.E.B. Du Bois's charged and brilliant career. Beginning with the return of World War I African-American veterans to the riots and lynchings of the "Red Summer" of 1919 and ending with Du Bois' self-imposed exile and death in Ghana forty-four years later, Lewis charts the dramatic evolution of the premier architect of the Civil Rights movement from Talented Tenth elitist to internationalist and proponent of economic as well as racial democracy for all people of color. Based on original research on three continents, this richly detailed volume of history alters our understanding of the culture and politics of race in the twentieth century.

Lewis chronicles the titanic struggle between Du Bois and Marcus Garvey's "back to Africa" movement, and interprets the Harlem Renaissance as a civil rights enterprise masquerading as an arts movement that Du Bois, a movement impresario, soon renounced in search of economic solutions to the race problem. After inspiring millions of black and white readers through the NAACP journal, The Crisis, Du Bois left the NAACP in a firestorm of controversy to pursue a politically risky course that took him inside Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, and Japan as the major geopolitics of the American Century were taking shape. Leaving mainstream historians to absorb the seismic impact of his 1935 masterpiece, Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois looked increasingly to socialism in his search for race solutions after a postwar return to the NAACP that ended with his embrace of the Progressive Party politics of Henry Wallace, a deepening friendship with Paul Robeson, and an expanding circle of friends on the left. Federal indictment as a foreign agent and humiliation followed but failed to silence the prescient voice that would come to inspire new generations with its genius. Had he died at fifty, the great contrarian said that he would have been acclaimed. "At seventy-five my death was practically requested."

W. E. B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919
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by David Levering Lewis

ISBN: 0805035680
Format: Paperback, 735pp
Pub. Date: September 1994
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois - the premier architect of the civil rights movement in America, a founder of the NAACP, - was a towering and controversial personality, a fiercely proud individual blessed with the language of the poet and the impatience of the agitator. This monumental biography - eight years in the research and writing - treats the early and middle phases of a long and intense career: a crucial fifty-year period that demonstrates how Du Bois changed forever the way Americans think about themselves. Photo inserts.

Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880
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by W.E.B. DuBois (Author), David Levering Lewis (Introduction)

Paperback: 768 pages
Publisher: Free Press (January 1, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0684856573
ISBN-13: 978-0684856575
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 2 inches

A Small Nation of People : W. E. B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress
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by David Levering Lewis & Deborah Willis

ISBN: 0060523425
Format: Hardcover, 208pp
Pub. Date: September 2003
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

As the world prepared to celebrate a century of progress at the 1900 International Exposition in Paris, W.E.B. Du Bois, then a sociology professor at Atlanta University, was approached by Thomas Calloway, an African American lawyer who called for black participation in the exposition, to illustrate progress made by black Americans since Emancipation. Du Bois, Calloway and Daniel A. P. Murray, a son of freed slaves and assistant Librarian of Congress, compiled books, manuscripts, artifacts and some 500 photographs of people, homes, churches, businesses and landscapes that defied stereotypes. “A Small Nation of People” brings together more than 150 of these photographs in a single volume for the first time.

Known as “The Exhibit of American Negroes,” the Paris display included a set of charts, maps and graphs prepared by Du Bois recording the growth of population, economic power and literacy among African Americans in Georgia. It also included photographs that exemplified dignity, accomplishment and progress such as images of African Americans attending universities and running businesses.

In the years following the exposition, Murray succeeded in acquiring the complete set of photographs for the Library’s Prints and Photographs collection. These images may be viewed on the Library’s Web site in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html) in the collection designated “African American Photographs Assembled for the 1900 Paris Exposition.” Prints of illustrations with reproduction numbers may be ordered from the Library’s Photo duplication Service.

Essays by Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis and photo historian Deborah Willis provide the context for the choice of these photographs and their importance today.

David Levering Lewis, a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, is the author of several books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes “W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century” and “W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race.” He is a professor of history at New York University.

Deborah Willis, also a MacArthur Fellow, writes frequently on African American themes as well as on the history of photography. Among her more recent publications is “Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840-Present.” She is a professor of photography and imaging at New York University.
—Library of Congress, press release "African American Life at Turn of 20th Century is Depicted in New Publication", October 16, 2003