Announcing David Levering Lewis

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, David Levering Lewis, will join us for the 2009 Seminar: Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. Lewis is the Julius Silver University Professor at New York University, specializing in 20th-century U.S. social history. He is the author of a two-volume life-and-times of W.E.B. DuBois, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (1993), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the Bancroft Prize, and the Francis Parkman Prize; and W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (2000), which also won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. He is the first author to win two Pulitzer Prizes for biography for back-to-back volumes.

Professor Lewis has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (twice), the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. He is a former trustee of the National Humanities Center, a former commissioner of the National Portrait Gallery, a former senator of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and was president of the Society of American Historians, 2002-'03.

Lewis joins fellow historians Eric Foner and Jill Lepore, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks, Booker Prize-winner Barry Unsworth, and iconoclast Gore Vidal for what promises to be an invigorating, weekend-long debate on the diverse contributions historians and novelists make to the writing of history. Click here to register.