Louis Rudolph Harlan (July 13, 1922 – January 22, 2010) was an American academic historian who wrote a two-volume biography of theAfrican-American educator and social leaderBooker T. Washington and edited several volumes of Washington materials. He won theBancroft Prize in 1973 and 1984, once for each volume, and the 1984Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for the second volume.^[1][2][3]

Harlan was born inClay County, Mississippi, near the small cityWest Point. When he was three, his father was financially unable to retain their farm and moved the family to another small city,Decatur, Georgia. At the start ofWorld War II, while he was a history student at nearbyEmory University, Harlan enlisted in theNavy and, upon receiving his degree (B.A., 1943),^[4] enteredmidshipman's school in 1943. Serving as an officer on an infantry landing craft, he participated in the D-DayNormandy Landings as well as subsequent invasions insouthern France. In the wake ofV-E Day, he was assigned toEnewetak Atoll in theMarshall Islands, in anticipation of the plannedinvasion of Japan. Over fifty years later, in his 1996 wartime memoir,All at Sea: Coming of Age in World War II, published byUniversity of Illinois Press, he recalled the long-ago conflict and drew historical lessons and parallels for future generations. Discharged in 1945, with the rank of lieutenant, he returned to the study of history, earning anM.A. atVanderbilt (1948) and aPh.D. atJohns Hopkins (1955) where, upon hearing a presentation by African-American historianJohn Hope Franklin, he determined to make race relations in the South his main field of endeavor. At Johns Hopkins, Harlan was a student ofC. Vann Woodward.^[5]

In 1958, as a white Southerner during the early years of thecivil rights movement, Louis Harlan published his first book,Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaport States, 1901–1915. Following stints as an associate professor atEast Texas State Teachers College andUniversity of Cincinnati, he became, in 1965, professor of history at theUniversity of Maryland, within easy access to the collection of documents left by Booker T. Washington. Over the next two decades, he continued to work on Washington's biography, while also editing, with another Washington historian,Raymond W. Smock, an edition of Washington's papers, which were published over a fourteen-year period, between 1972 and 1988, ultimately reaching fourteen volumes.

The two volumes of the biography, published eleven years apart, received praise from scholars and historians who referred to Harlan's ability in elucidating Washington's personality which, in Harlan's words, "had vanished into the roles it had played".^[6]

During his career Louis R. Harlan also served as president of theAmerican Historical Association, theOrganization of American Historians, and theSouthern Historical Association. He retired in 1992 and spent the immediate years completing his war memoir. Diagnosed withCrohn's Disease, he died inLexington, Virginia, at the age of 87, and was survived by his wife, Sadie, two sons, Louis and Benjamin, and a grandchild.

• 1984,Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography forBooker T. Washington, volume 2^[3]
• 1973 and 1984,^[7]Bancroft Prize, forBooker T. Washington, volumes 1 and 2
• Beveridge Award for his books about Booker T. Washington

• Booker T. Washington: the Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901. Oxford University Press. 1972.
• Booker T. Washington: the Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915, Volume 2. Oxford. 1983.ISBN 978-0-19-503202-4.

• Raymond Smock, ed. (2006).Booker T. Washington in Perspective: Essays of Louis R. Harlan. University Press of Mississippi.ISBN 978-1-57806-928-6.
• Harlan, Louis R. "Sympathy and Detachment: Dilemmas of a Biographer." Conspectus of History 1.1 (1974): 29–36

• ALL AT SEA: Coming of Age in World War II. University of Illinois Press. 2001.ISBN 978-0-252-07072-3.

• Louis R. Harlan atLibrary of Congress, with 11 library catalog records

• 20th-century American historians
• American male non-fiction writers
• Bancroft Prize winners
• Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners
• Writers from Georgia (U.S. state)
• Historians from Mississippi
• University of Maryland, College Park faculty
• Emory University alumni
• Vanderbilt University alumni
• Johns Hopkins University alumni
• People from Clay County, Mississippi
• People from Decatur, Georgia
• 1922 births
• 2010 deaths
• 20th-century American male writers

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• Articles with hCards