Donald, David Herbert

Related Category: Historians, U.S.: Biographies

1920–, American historian, b. Goodman, Miss. After receiving his Ph.D. from the Univ. of Illinois in 1946, he taught at Columbia (1947–49; 1951–59), Smith (1949–51), Princeton (1959–62), Johns Hopkins (1962–1972), and Harvard (1973–91; emeritus 1991–). An authority on the periods of the Civil War and Reconstruction, his biography of Charles Sumner received the 1960 Pulitzer Prize. Donald prepared a revised edition (1969) of J. G. Randall's standard work Civil War and Reconstruction (1937) and edited the Civil War diaries of Salmon P. Chase as Inside Lincoln's Cabinet (1954). His other works include Lincoln Reconsidered (1956, 2d enl. ed. 1966), Politics of Reconstruction, 1863–1867 (1965), Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (1970), Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (1987; Pulitzer 1988), and Lincoln (1995).