Donald won his second Pulitzer, in 1988, for “Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe” (1987). Donald made the case for Sumner, often dismissed as a seething radical and crank, as an authoritative moral voice on the issue of rights for black Americans, more often right than wrong, and well out in front of his party and its leader, Lincoln. “Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man” followed in 1970. “Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War” (1960), the first volume in his magisterial biography of Sumner, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1961. He went on to write and edit numerous histories of the Civil War, which were praised as much for their narrative vigor and elegance of style as for their insights into the period. Donald, a native of Mississippi, first made his mark with “Lincoln’s Herndon” (1948), a study of Lincoln’s law partner and early biographer, William Henry Herndon. His death was confirmed by his wife, Aida D. David Herbert Donald, a leading American historian of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War who won Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of the abolitionist statesman Charles Sumner and the novelist Thomas Wolfe, died Sunday in Boston.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |