Louis R. Harlan, Historian of Booker T. Washington, Dies at 87
Louis R. Harlan, whose definitive two-volume biography of Booker T. Washington convincingly embraced its subject’s daunting complexities and ambiguities and won both the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, died on Jan. 22 in Lexington, Va. He was 87....
Mr. Harlan, a white Southerner, made race relations and Southern history his field of inquiry after attending a guest lecture by John Hope Franklin at Johns Hopkins University in the 1940s. When the historian Marquis James died in 1955 before he could embark on a planned biography of Washington, Mr. Harlan took up the task.
It took him nearly three decades to finish it, largely because at the same time he was editing, with Raymond L. Smock, a 14-volume edition of Washington’s papers, published between 1972 and 1988.
“Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901” was published by Oxford University Press in 1972 and won the Bancroft Prize the following year. “Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915,” published by Oxford in 1983, won both the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1984. “It was the first really three-dimensional work that went into the secret life, the private world, of the most famous black man of his time,” said Mr. Smock, the author of “Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow” (Ivan R. Dee, 2009)....
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Mr. Harlan, a white Southerner, made race relations and Southern history his field of inquiry after attending a guest lecture by John Hope Franklin at Johns Hopkins University in the 1940s. When the historian Marquis James died in 1955 before he could embark on a planned biography of Washington, Mr. Harlan took up the task.
It took him nearly three decades to finish it, largely because at the same time he was editing, with Raymond L. Smock, a 14-volume edition of Washington’s papers, published between 1972 and 1988.
“Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901” was published by Oxford University Press in 1972 and won the Bancroft Prize the following year. “Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915,” published by Oxford in 1983, won both the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1984. “It was the first really three-dimensional work that went into the secret life, the private world, of the most famous black man of his time,” said Mr. Smock, the author of “Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow” (Ivan R. Dee, 2009)....