David Levering Lewis

David Levering Lewis is a biographer, a cultural historian, and a scholar of race relations. He breaks new ground in his methods of biographical research and in analyzing America's racial dilemma. His innovative and rigorous studies of African American, intellectual and social leaders have influenced a generation of scholars. Lewis examines his subjects and their achievements expansively, without bypassing faults and limitations, and always with a penetrating insight into the larger, trans-racial contexts of their experience. His graceful narrative style is nuanced and comprehensive, yet always accessible. Additionally, his sophisticated studies of the Harlem Renaissance in New York and the events surrounding the Dreyfus Affair in France are models of social and intellectual history. Lewis is the Julius Silver University Professor and a professor of history at New York University. He is the author of many works, including King: A Biography (1970), Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair (1975), When Harlem Was in Vogue (1982), W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (1993), and W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (2000). Lewis received a B.A. (1965) from Fisk University, an M.A. (1958) from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. (1962) from the London School of Economics.