Entity | Dumas Malone

Dumas Malone (January 10, 1892 – December 27, 1986) was an American historian, biographer, and editor noted for his six-volume biography on Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson and His Time, for which he received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for history and his co-editorship of the twenty-volume Dictionary of American Biography. In 1983, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Malone was born at Coldwater, Mississippi, on January 10, 1892, the son of clergyman John W. and suffragist schoolteacher, Lillian Kemp Malone. He received his bachelor's degree in 1910 from Emory College (Emory University). He was a member of Sigma Nu Fraternity. In 1916 he received his divinity degree from Yale University. Between 1917 and 1919 during the First World War, he became a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. Following the war, he returned to Yale University where he obtained his Master's (1921) and doctorate (1923) degrees. He won the John Addison Porter prize in 1923 for his dissertation The Public Life of Thomas Cooper, 1783–1839 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926).