W.E.B. Du Bois

Who Was W.E.B. Du Bois?

W.E.B. Du Bois was the most important African American intellectual of the twentieth century — a sociologist, historian, editor, novelist, and activist whose career spanned nearly a century and whose intellectual range was exceeded by almost no one of his generation. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, he was the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, studied at the University of Berlin, and produced a body of work that fundamentally shaped American understanding of race, democracy, and justice.

His masterwork, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), is one of the most important books in American literary and intellectual history. Its central concepts — double consciousness, the veil, the color line — remain indispensable for understanding the experience of Black Americans and the structure of American racism. The book’s literary quality matches its intellectual significance: its prose, at once analytical and lyrical, is among the finest in the American tradition.

Du Bois is significant for TLA because his concept of double consciousness — the condition of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” — is one of the most precise literary descriptions of the condition of alienation from one’s own identity that the Fall produces. His lifelong struggle for a wholeness that his society would not permit is a form of the longing for the restoration of the image of God that the serpent’s work has fractured.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Philadelphia Negro — 1899 — sociology
• The Souls of Black Folk — 1903
• John Brown — 1909 — biography
• The Quest of the Silver Fleece — 1911 — novel
• Darkwater — 1920 — essays
• Black Reconstruction in America — 1935
• The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois — 1968 — posthumous