Authors

There is no collected edition of Du Bois’s prolific output, but several interesting collections of Du Bois’s writings are available: Philip S. Foner’s W. E. B. DuBois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses (1970), Meyer Weinberg’s W. E. B. DuBois: A Reader (1970), Andrew G. Paschol, A W. E. B. DuBois Reader (1971), Herbert Lee Moon’s The Emerging Thought of W. E. B. DuBois: Essays and Editorials from the “Crisis” (1972), and Dan S. Green and Edwin D. Driver’s W. E. B. DuBois on Sociology in the Black Community (1978), which includes sixteen articles by DuBois. Herbert Aptheker edited the three volumes of The Correspondence of W. E. B. DuBois (1973–1978), the four volumes of Writings by W. E. B. DuBois in Periodicals Edited by Others (1982), Selections form Phylon (1980), and Selections from the Crisis in two volumes (1972). Phil Zuckerman’s collection Du Bois on Religion (2000) also contains a perceptive introduction. Eric J. Sundquist’s The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader (1996) offers a very substantial selection and features as good a biocritical introduction as any in print. The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois: Selections, 1877–1934 and The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois: Selections, 1934–1944 have been edited by Herbert Aptheker (1997). W. E. B. Du Bois: An Encyclopedia, edited by Gerald Horne and Mary Young (2001) contains 150 entries. Several biographies of Du Bois are available: Leslie A. Lacey’s Cheer the Lonesome Traveler: The Life of W. E. B. DuBois (1970), Shirley Graham’s His Day Is Marching On: A Memoir of W. E. B. DuBois (1971), and Arnold Rampersad’s perceptive critical study The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. DuBois (1976) as well as his chapter on Du Bois in his Slavery and the Literary Imagination 1989). David Levering Lewis’s two-volume W. E. B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (1993) and W. E. B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (2000) are outstanding. Significant background to Du Bois’s place in American intellectual thought may be found in August Meier’s Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915 (1963) and John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes, 7th ed. (1994). Jack B. Moore’s W. E. B. DuBois (1981) provides a brief critical biography and introductory survey of his writings, while Joseph P. De Marco’s The Social Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois (1983) is thorough and helpful on this complex topic; the collection of essays edited by Bernard W. Bell, Emily Grosholz, and James B. Stewart—W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics (1966)—is also a distinguished contribution, as is the gathering of essays in W. E. B. Du Bois, Race and the City: “The Philadelphia Negro” and Its Legacy (1998) edited by Michael B. Katz and Thomas J. Sugrue, situating Du Bois in late his nineteenth-century intellectual milieu, exploring his influence on later writers, and assessing his relevance today. Further contexts are supplied in W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (2000) by David Levering Lewis, which won Pulitzer Prize; Creative Conflict in African American Thought: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey, by Wilson Jeremiah Moses (2004); The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920 by Jonathan M. Hansen, which covers Eugene V. Debs, Jane Addams, and Du Bois (2003); Du Bois and His Rivals, Raymond Wolters (2002), which addresses themes of civil rights and social change; and The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940 by Mathew Prat Guterl (2001) treats racial attitudes such as biracialism in social change, comparing Du Bois to Jean Toomer, and others. The centennial of publication of The Philadelphia Negro is celebrated in Dolan Hubbard’s The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later (2003) with reviews and contextual and interpretive essays; and W. E. B. DuBois and Race: Essays Celebrating the Centennial Publication of The Souls of Black Folk, is edited Chester J. Fontenot and Mary Alice Morgan (2001). Manning Marable’s W. E. B. DuBois: Black Radical Democrat (1986) is similarly insightful on Du Bois’s politics. Adolph L. Reed Jr.’s controversial W. E. B. DuBois and American Political Thought (1995) may also be consulted. William L. Andrews’s Critical Essays on W. E. B. DuBois (1985) is the best such collection. Critical works of special interest include Houston A. Baker Jr.’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987), Keith E. Byerman’s Seizing the World: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. DuBois (1994), Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (1967, 1984), Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the “Racial” Self (1987), Sterling Stuckey’s Slave Culture: National Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987), Eric J. Sundquist’s magisterial To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993), and Shannon Zamir’s W. E. B. DuBois and American Thought, 1888–1903 (1995). A special W. E. B. Du Bois issue of Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture appeared in 2000.

Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, W. E. B. Du Bois was a teacher and writer. He began his career at Wilberforce College in Ohio, then a small, poor, black college, moving later to the University of Pennsylvania and, finally, to Atlanta University, where he devoted thirteen years to researching and writing sociological studies of African American life. As expressed in his influential work The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois's philosophy differed radically from that of Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, who recommended, in his Atlanta Exposition Address (1895), that blacks settle for a lesser education and accept segregation in exchange for a tolerant attitude from whites. Du Bois joined the Niagara Movement in 1905 and worked aggressively toward achieving civil rights for African Americans. He moved to New York in 1910 and spent the next twenty-five years as editor of Crisis, the publication for the new organization, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Du Bois grew increasingly frustrated with the little progress African Americans were making and began to move toward Pan African and socialist thought. He joined the Communist Party of the United States in 1961 and became a citizen of Ghana in 1963.