Dumas Malone (; January 10, 1892 – December 27, 1986) was an American historian, minister, and biographer. A professor by occupation, Malone spent the majority of his career teaching at the University of Virginia (UVA), where he served as the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History.
Malone was best known for his six-volume biography, Jefferson and His Time, for which he received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for History. Completed in 1981, the series became Malone's defining work and is considered the foremost authoritative biography of Thomas Jefferson. Before beginning a lifelong career as a biographer, he was editor-in-chief of the twenty-volume Dictionary of American Biography and the third director of the Harvard University Press. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Early life and education
Upbringing
Malone was born in Coldwater, Mississippi, on January 10, 1892, to clergyman John W. Malone (1856–1930) and suffragist schoolteacher Lillian Kemp. He was raised in a poor, religious household which hailed from the Deep South, and his grandfather was a Confederate veteran who served in the American Civil War. Both his mother and father were active educators who recognized the value of an intellectual upbringing—his mother fostered his early disposition for reading, and his father served as an academic at a variety of educational institutions. After Malone's birth, the family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where John Malone served as president of the Woman's College of Oxford, later becoming a minister in Brunswick, Georgia. In 1902, Malone's father was made president of Andrew College.
In 1906, Malone matriculated at Emory College (now Emory University) at the age of fourteen, receiving his Bachelor of Arts as the youngest member of its class of 1910. His education at Emory consisted primarily of classical courses supplemented by Latin and Greek literature, the latter of which he was influenced by the classicist Charles Peppler; Malone later reflected of Peppler's class, "If I am something of a classicist in spirit, that course is one of the reasons for it." He also took great inspiration from the economist Edgar H. Johnson, the instructor of the college's only history course, whose teaching Malone credited with leaving "an abiding impression."
Despite doing well in the university's classics courses, Malone later recalled being "not a particularly good student," owing his youth and immaturity as reasons for having been unprepared in college. He played center for the class football team and was a member of the Sigma Nu fraternity, though otherwise graduated from the college relatively undistinguished. Regardless, he later fondly remembered Emory as a "modest home of humane learning." When the college inducted him into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society in 1930, Malone remarked, "That was lucky for me. I am sure they did not pay much attention to my old undergraduate record. I was too busy exploring life to do full justice to my studies."
Ministry and Yale
Malone initially sought to study religion and enter the ministry upon graduating. He spent several years as a teacher in small, local schools; at Andrew College, he lectured on topics including mathematics, history, and the Bible. Finding a passion for teaching, he briefly taught biblical literature as an adjunct professor at Randolph-Macon Woman's College, where two of his sisters had been educated.
After spending a year at Vanderbilt University, Malone enrolled in Yale Divinity School where he excelled academically, obtaining a Fogg scholarship for his first semester, and earning a Bachelor of Divinity in 1916. He 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. Malone's studies were abruptly interrupted by World War I. He left Yale in 1917 to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps after temporarily training as part of the Army YMCA at Camp Wheeler, becoming a Second lieutenant after graduating from Parris Island. However, the war ended before he saw active combat and he was discharged in January 1919. Malone subsequently returned to Yale to obtain a doctorate in history, enrolling as a graduate student. Later that same year, he was appointed as an instructor of history and began teaching a course in American history for undergraduates.