Major Works
- Dictionary of American Biography (editor)
- Empire for Liberty: The Genesis and Growth of the United States of America (1960) with Basil Rauch
- Jefferson and His Time 5 vols. (1948-1981) Pulitzer Prize for history in 1975
- Saints in Action (1939)
- The Public Life of Thomas Cooper (1926)
Biography of Dumas Malone
Historian Dumas Malone was born in Coldwater, Mississippi, in 1892, to John W. and Lillian Kemp Malone. He is the brother of the well-known etymologist and linguist Kemp Malone. He received a B.A from Emory University in Atlanta in 1910 and earned a divinity degree from Yale University in 1916. He served in World War I in the Marine Corps from 1917 to 1919. After the war Malone returned to Yale, where he obtained his master’s degree in 1921 and his doctorate in 1923.
Malone became a professor at the University of Virginia, starting as associate in 1923 and becoming full professor in 1926. In 1925, he married Elisabeth Gifford and they had a son and a daughter. He was editor of The Dictionary of American Biography from 1929 to 1931, and then editor-in-chief from 1931 to 1936. From 1936 to 1942, he was editor-in-chief at Harvard University Press. From 1945 to 1959, he was a professor at Columbia University, but he then returned to the University of Virginia to teach.
Malone was the foremost expert on Thomas Jefferson, studying and writing about Jefferson even as his eyesight began to fail in 1977. His six books on Jefferson, collectively titled Jefferson and His Time, were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1975. The series was completed in 1981.
Malone was Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Virginia and the Jefferson Memorial Foundation biographer-in-residence. He won many awards, and in 1983, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Malone died in 1986 at the age of 94 in Charlottesville, Virginia.