David Levering Lewis facts for kids

Quick facts for kids 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

David Levering Lewis (born May 25, 1936) is an American historian. He is a professor at New York University. He has won the famous Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography twice! He won for his two books about the life of W. E. B. Du Bois. He is the first author to win two Pulitzer Prizes for books about the same person.

Lewis has written eight books and edited two others. He mostly studies history by comparing different times and places. He focuses on American social history and the civil rights movement in the 20th century. He is also interested in Africa in the 1800s, France in the 1900s, and Islamic Spain.

Early Life and School

David Lewis was born in 1936 in Little Rock, Arkansas. His family was a middle-class African-American family. His father, John Henry Lewis Sr., was a college president and school principal. His mother, Alice U. Bell Lewis, was a high school math teacher.

David went to school in Little Rock. Later, his family moved to Ohio, and he attended Wilberforce Preparatory School. When his father became president of Morris Brown College, they moved to Atlanta. David went to Booker T. Washington High School there.

He started college early at age fifteen. He went to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee and graduated in 1956. After a short time in law school, he studied history at Columbia University. He earned his master's degree in 1959. He then went to the London School of Economics in England. He earned his Ph.D. in modern European and French history in 1962.

From 1961 to 1962, Lewis served in the United States Army in Germany.

Family Life

David Lewis has three grown children from his first marriage: Eric, Allison, and Jason.

Teaching Career

In 1963, Lewis taught about medieval African history at the University of Ghana. When he returned to the United States, he taught at several universities. These included Morgan State University, the University of Notre Dame, and Howard University.

From 1980 to 1984, he was a history professor at the University of California at San Diego. In 1985, Lewis joined Rutgers University. While there, he wrote his two Pulitzer Prize-winning books about W. E. B. Du Bois. He also finished his book The Race to Fashoda. He taught at Rutgers for 18 years.

In 2003, Lewis became a professor at New York University. He has also received special awards and support from many important groups. These include the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Writing and Public Work

David Lewis wrote the first academic book about Martin Luther King Jr. It was published in 1970. He also wrote Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair in 1974. Other books include The Bicentennial History of the District of Columbia (1976) and When Harlem Was in Vogue (1980).

His two books about W. E. B. Du Bois won him two Pulitzer Prizes. The first volume won in 1994, and the second in 2001. He also won the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize for his first volume.

Lewis has been a trustee for the National Humanities Center. He was also a commissioner for the National Portrait Gallery. He has appeared as a history expert in TV documentaries. These include New York: A Documentary Film (1999) and The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (2013).

He was president of the Society of American Historians in 2002. He is also on the board of The Crisis magazine, published by the NAACP. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2010, President Barack Obama gave him the 2009 National Humanities Medal. This is a very high honor for people who work in the humanities.

Special Degrees

David Levering Lewis has received many honorary degrees from different universities. These are special awards given to people who have achieved great things. Some of these include:

• Doctorate of Humane Letters from Harvard University in 2023
• Doctor of Humane Letters from Columbia University in 2015
• Honorary Degree from Northwestern University in 2010
• Doctor of Humane Letters from Bates College in 2004
• Doctor of Letters from Emory University in 2003

Books by David Levering Lewis

• Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair, 1974.
• District of Columbia: A Bicentennial History, 1976.
• When Harlem Was in Vogue, 1981.
• The Race for Fashoda: European Colonialism and African Resistance in The Scramble for Africa, 1987.
• The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (as editor), 1994.
• A Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois & African American Portraits of Progress, (with Deborah Willis), 2003.
• God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, 2008.
• The Implausible Wendell Willkie: Leadership Ahead of Its Time in Profiles in Leadership (as a chapter), 2011.

See also

In Spanish: David Levering Lewis para niños