David Levering Lewis
Born	(1936-05-25)May 25, 1936 (age 89) Little Rock, Arkansas, U.S.
Alma mater	Fisk University Columbia University London School of Economics
Awards	Pulitzer Prize (1994, 2001) National Humanities Medal 2009 Bancroft Prize Francis Parkman Prize
Scientific career
Fields	History
Institutions	New York University
Website	NYU faculty page
Notes
[1]

David Levering Lewis (born May 25, 1936) is an American historian, a Julius Silver University Professor, and professor emeritus of history atNew York University. He is twice winner of thePulitzer Prizefor Biography or Autobiography, for part one and part two of his biography ofW. E. B. Du Bois (in 1994 and 2001, respectively). He is the first author to win Pulitzer Prizes for biography for two successive volumes on the same subject.

The author of eight books and editor of two more, Lewis concentrates on comparative history with special focus on twentieth-century United States social history andcivil rights. His interests include nineteenth-century Africa,twentieth-century France, andIslamic Spain.

Lewis was born in 1936 inLittle Rock, Arkansas to amiddle-class African-American family. His father John Henry Lewis Sr. graduated fromMorris Brown College in Atlanta, andYale Divinity School, becoming its first African-American graduate. Lewis Sr. also earned an M.A. insociology from theUniversity of Chicago and became principal ofDunbar Junior and Senior High School and Junior College in Little Rock and President of Morris Brown College from 1920 to 1928 and again from 1951 to 1958.^[2] Lewis's mother, Alice U. Bell Lewis, taught high school math.

While the family lived in Little Rock, David Lewis attended parochial school and attended Wilberforce Preparatory School andXenia High School after his father became Dean of the Theological School atWilberforce University inWilberforce, Ohio.

The family moved toAtlanta after his father became President of Morris Brown College and Lewis attendedBooker T. Washington High School in his junior year. He gained early admission at age fifteen toFisk University inNashville, Tennessee and graduatedPhi Beta Kappa in 1956.

Lewis briefly attended theUniversity of Michigan Law School but left to attendColumbia University, where he earned hisM.A. inhistory in 1959. He went to theLondon School of Economics for his doctorate, earning his Ph.D. in 1962 in modern European and French history.^[3][4]

In 1961–1962, Lewis served in theUnited States Army as a psychiatric technician andprivate first class inLandstuhl, Germany.^[5]

Lewis has three adult children (Eric, Allison, and Jason) from his first marriage.

In 1963, Lewis lectured at theUniversity of Ghana on medieval African history. After returning to the United States, Lewis taught atMorgan State University, theUniversity of Notre Dame,Howard University, and theUniversity of the District of Columbia from 1970 to 1980 as associate and full professor. Lewis was professor of history atUniversity of California at San Diego from 1980 to 1984.

In 1985, Lewis joinedRutgers University as the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of History, where he wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning two volume-biography ofW. E. B. Du Bois and finished writingThe Race to Fashoda: European Colonialism and African Resistance in the Scramble for Africa during his 18-year tenure.

In spring semester 2001, Lewis served as distinguished visiting professor in Harvard's history department.

In 2003, Lewis was appointed as the Julius Silver University Professor and Professor of History atNew York University.

He has received fellowships from theCenter for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, theNational Humanities Center, theWoodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, theJohn Simon Guggenheim Foundation, theAmerican Philosophical Society, and theJohn D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Lewis is the author of the first academic biography ofMartin Luther King Jr., which was published in 1970, less than two years after the subject's assassination. HisPrisoners of Honor: TheDreyfus Affair was published in 1974;The Bicentennial History of the District of Columbia was published in 1976; andWhen Harlem Was in Vogue in 1980. Lewis wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning two volume-biography ofW. E. B. Du Bois during his 18-year tenure at Rutgers.

In addition to the two Pulitzer Prizes for his volumes on W. E. B. Du Bois, published in 1994 and 2001,^[6][7][8] Lewis won theBancroft Prize and theFrancis Parkman Prize^[9] in 1994 for his first volume. In 2001 he won theAnisfield-Wolf Book Award^[10] for his second volume on Du Bois, published that year.

He is a former trustee of the National Humanities Center, former commissioner of theNational Portrait Gallery, and a former senator ofPhi Beta Kappa.

Lewis appeared as a historical expert in the 1999 filmNew York: A Documentary Film, directed byRic Burns forPBS andThe African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross 2013 documentary miniseries written and presented byHenry Louis Gates Jr. for PBS.

He was president of theSociety of American Historians in 2002,^[11] and is a board member of the magazineThe Crisis, published by theNAACP. He is a fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences and theAmerican Philosophical Society. He was an Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow at theAmerican Academy in Berlin, Germany, in spring 2008.

PresidentBarack Obama awarded him the 2009National Humanities Medal^[12] at theWhite House on February 25, 2010. Lewis delivered the inaugural convocation lecture atNew York University Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates on September 19, 2010.

• Doctorate of Humane Letters fromHarvard University in 2023^[13]
• Doctor of Humane Letters from University of the District of Columbia in 2016^[14]
• Doctorate of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa, fromColumbia University in 2015^[15]
• Honorary Degree fromNorthwestern University in 2010^[16]
• Honorary Degree fromNew School University in 2005^[17]
• Doctor of Humane Letters fromBates College in 2004^[18]
• Doctor of Humane Letters fromMarymount Manhattan College in 2004^[19]
• Doctor of Letters fromEmory University in 2003^[20]
• Doctor of Letters fromWheaton College in 2003^[21]
• Honorary Doctorate fromBard College in 2002^[22]
• Honorary Doctorate fromTeachers College at Columbia University in 2002^[23]
• Honorary Doctorate fromLehman College in 1995^[24]

External videos
Booknotes interview with Lewis onW.E.B. Dubois: The Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, January 2, 1994,C-SPAN
Presentation by Lewis onW.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 at the Atlanta History Center, October 30, 2000,C-SPAN
Interview with Lewis aboutW.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963, April 29, 2001,C-SPAN
Presentation by Lewis about his Du Bois biographies at the National Book Festival, September 8, 2001,C-SPAN
Presentation by Lewis and Deborah Willis on their bookA Small Nation of People: W.E.B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress, October 29, 2003,C-SPAN
Q&A interview with Lewis onThe Improbable Wendell Willkie, November 4, 2018,C-SPAN

• King: A Biography. University of Illinois Press. 1970.ISBN 978-0-252-00680-7.; Univ. of Illinois Press, 1979.
• Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair, William Morrow, 1974.
• District of Columbia: A Bicentennial History, W.W. Norton, 1976.
• The Race for Fashoda: European Colonialism and African Resistance in The Scramble for Africa. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987ISBN 1-55584-058-2
• David L. Lewis (ed.)The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, Viking, 1994,ISBN 9780670845101
• William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (15 February 1995). David Levering Lewis (ed.).W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader. Henry Holt and Company.ISBN 978-0-8050-3264-2.
• When Harlem Was in Vogue New York: Knopf, 1981,ISBN 9780394495729
• W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. Henry Holt and Company. 1993.ISBN 978-1-4668-4151-2. Winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and winner also of the Bancroft and Parkman prizes.
• W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919-1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century. Henry Holt and Company. 1 September 2001.ISBN 978-0-8050-6813-9. Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and theAnisfield-Wolf Book Award
• The Race to Fashoda. Henry Holt. 1 December 2001.ISBN 978-0-8050-7119-1.
• (withDeborah Willis)A Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois & African American Portraits of Progress, HarperCollins, 2003.
• God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2008)
• W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography. Henry Holt and Company. 4 August 2009.ISBN 978-0-8050-8805-2.
• The Implausible Wendell Willkie: Leadership Ahead of Its Time inWalter Isaacson (ed.)Profiles in Leadership (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011)
• The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order. New York, NY: Liveright. 2018.ISBN 978-0-871-40457-2.
• The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958. New York, NY: Penguin Press. 2025.ISBN 978-1-984-87990-5.

• "W.E.B. DuBois as a Historical Novelist" Audio recording: David Levering Lewis at theKey West Literary Seminar, 2009
• "Pulitzer Prize for Biography: David Levering Lewis", with Gwen Ifill,PBS Newshour, 23 April 2001
• Lewis On How Harlem Became A Place For African Americans, PBS WNET, New York
• Appearances onC-SPAN
  • Interview with Lewis,In Depth, 3 February 2008,C-SPAN

• 1936 births
• 21st-century African-American academics
• 21st-century American academics
• Living people
• Historians of race relations
• 21st-century American historians
• 21st-century American male writers
• American biographers
• Bancroft Prize winners
• Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners
• MacArthur Fellows
• Fisk University alumni
• University of Michigan Law School alumni
• Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
• Rutgers University faculty
• Alumni of the London School of Economics
• Writers from New York (state)
• Writers from Little Rock, Arkansas
• Academic staff of the University of Ghana
• Howard University faculty
• University of California, San Diego faculty
• Harvard University faculty
• New York University faculty
• National Humanities Medal recipients
• Academic staff of New York University Abu Dhabi
• Academics from Arkansas
• United States Army soldiers
• American male non-fiction writers
• 21st-century African-American writers
• 20th-century African-American academics
• 20th-century American academics
• African-American male writers
• Members of the American Philosophical Society

• Webarchive template wayback links
• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Articles with hCards
• People appearing on C-SPAN