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 Prize for 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.
Books in order of publication:
King: A Biography. University of Illinois Press. 1970.
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
David L. Lewis (ed.) The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, Viking, 1994
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (15 February 1995). David Levering Lewis (ed.). W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader. Henry Holt and Company.
When Harlem Was in Vogue New York: Knopf, 1981
W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. Henry Holt and Company. 1993.
W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919-1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century. Henry Holt and Company. 1 September 2001.
The Race to Fashoda. Henry Holt. 1 December 2001.
(with Deborah 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.
The Implausible Wendell Willkie: Leadership Ahead of Its Time in Walter 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.
The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958. New York, NY: Penguin Press. 2025
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