27 Facts About Dumas Malone

Dumas Malone was an American historian, minister, and biographer.

Dumas Malone was best known for his six-volume biography, Jefferson and His Time, for which he received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for History.

Dumas Malone was raised in a poor, religious household from the Deep South and his grandfather was a Confederate veteran who served in the American Civil War.

In 1902, Dumas Malone's father became the president of Andrew College.

In 1906, Dumas Malone matriculated at Emory College at the age of 14, receiving his Bachelor of Arts as the youngest member of the class of 1910.

Dumas Malone played center for the class football team and was a member of the Sigma Nu fraternity, though otherwise graduated from the college relatively undistinguished.

Dumas Malone initially sought to study religion and enter the ministry upon graduating.

Dumas Malone spent several years as a teacher in small, local schools; at Andrew College, he lectured on topics including mathematics, history, and the Bible.

Dumas Malone had found his time at the university intellectually liberating, acquiring a passion for writing and abandoning his pursuit of theology in order to study history.

Dumas Malone then returned to Yale to obtain a doctorate in history.

In 1921, Dumas Malone received his master's degree and, in 1923, earned his Doctor of Philosophy in history.

Dumas Malone undertook the courses in European and American history, giving up the courses in European history upon the arrival of Stringfellow Barr and thereafter introduced new courses in colonial history and more contemporary American history.

Dumas Malone mulled extensively over the choice, consulting friends such as Arthur M Schlesinger Sr.

Dumas Malone found the seven years he had spent editing the DAB as being dull and tedious, stating, upon leaving, that he would never edit again.

At the recommendation of Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe, Dumas Malone was suggested as a possible candidate to serve as the third director of the Harvard University Press.

Conant believed it appropriate for Dumas Malone to possess an academic title at the university and offered to name him as a professor of history, though Dumas Malone declined the post.

Dumas Malone viewed the role of the Harvard University Press as primarily an academic institution as opposed to a business.

In early 1944, the historian Douglas Southall Freeman recommended that Dumas Malone be supplemented by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Since Dumas Malone was then unaffiliated with any institution and thus unable to satisfy the requirements for the grant, UVA president John Lloyd Newcomb and the university's librarian, Harry Clemons, arranged for him to be given an honorary position so as to be affiliated with the University of Virginia.

Dumas Malone was at first reluctant to accept the position as it would disrupt his work on the first volume of his Jefferson biography, but accepted when the Rockefeller Foundation amended the terms of his agreement to fit a part-time teaching post.

In 1959, Dumas Malone returned to the University of Virginia as Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor, moving over to a biographer and residence position in 1962 but remaining affiliated with the university and living in Charlottesville.

In 1947, Dumas Malone finished his first volume, Jefferson the Virginian, and published the work on Jefferson's birthday the next year.

Dumas Malone was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1936.

Dumas Malone's volumes concluded that it was impossible for Jefferson to have had a relationship with Sally Hemings.

Dumas Malone published a set of lectures, Thomas Jefferson as Political Leader, with the University of California Press.

Dumas Malone married Elizabeth Gifford in 1925, with whom he would have two children.

Dumas Malone died on December 27,1986, at his home in Charlottesville.