David Levering Lewis (born May 25, 1936) is an American historian, a Julius Silver University Professor, and professor emeritus of history at New York University. He is twice winner of the Pulitzer Prizefor Biography or Autobiography, for part one and part two of his biography of W. 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 and civil rights. His interests include nineteenth-century Africa, twentieth-century France, and Islamic Spain.
While the family lived in Little Rock, David Lewis attended parochial school and attended Wilberforce Preparatory School and Xenia High School after his father became Dean of the Theological School at Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio.
In 1985, Lewis joined Rutgers University as the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of History, where he wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning two volume-biography of W. E. B. Du Bois and finished writing The 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 at New York University.
Lewis is the author of the first academic biography of Martin Luther King Jr., which was published in 1970, less than two years after the subject's assassination. His Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair was published in 1974; The Bicentennial History of the District of Columbia was published in 1976; and When Harlem Was in Vogue in 1980. Lewis wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning two volume-biography of W. 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 the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize[9] in 1994 for his first volume. In 2001 he won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award[10] for his second volume on Du Bois, published that year.
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, 1987 ISBN1-55584-058-2
David L. Lewis (ed.) The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, Viking, 1994, ISBN9780670845101
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. ISBN978-0-871-40457-2.
^"CV David Levering Lewis"(PDF). Archived from the original(PDF) on 2006-09-01. Retrieved 2006-05-10., Faculty of Arts and Sciences, New York University