W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race.

• Author: Egerton, John

Before he turned thirty, near the end of the Nineteenth Century, Harvard alumnus W.E.B. Du Bois had already served notice on Booker T. Washington and a host of white scholars and politicians that his was a voice to be reckoned with. But no one, including Du Bois himself, could have imagined that his career as a social activist and scholar would span more than sixty years. The granitic New Englander was destined to be not only the foremost black intellectual of his time, but also one of America's great thinkers and doers through the decades between the birth of the NAACP and the death of Jim Crow.

Rutgers University historian David Levering Lewis (an intellectual star in his own right, thanks to four previous books of superior quality, one of them a sparkling portrait of the...