W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963

Finalist, National Book Awards 2000 for Nonfiction

David Levering Lewis – W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963
ISBN 9780805025347
Henry Holt & Company
David Levering Lewis
David Levering Lewis

David Levering Lewis is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the two-volume biography of W. E. B. Du Bois. He has been awarded numerous prizes and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship. More about this author >

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The second volume of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography. W.E.B. Du Bois was a historian, novelist, editor, sociologist, founder of the NAACP, advocate of women’s rights, and the premier architect of the Civil Rights movement. His hypnotic voice thunders out of David Levering Lewis’s monumental biography like a locomotive under full steam.

This second volume of what is already a classic work begins with the triumphal return from WWI of African American veterans to the shattering reality of racism and lynching even as America discovers the New Negro of literature and art. In stunning detail, Lewis chronicles the little-known political agenda behind the Harlem Renaissance and Du Bois’s relentless fight for equality and justice, including his steadfast refusal to allow whites to interpret the aspirations of black America. Seared by the rejection of terrified liberals and the black bourgeoisie during the Communist witch-hunts, Du Bois ended his days in uncompromising exile in newly independent Ghana. In re-creating the turbulent times in which he lived and fought, Lewis restores the inspiring and famed Du Bois to his central place in American history.

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