-
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
-
-
A summing up...
-
In a career spanning seven decades, Du Bois wrote literally millions of words. He delivered more than 300 speeches and wrote 23 books, at least 400 articles, 130 pages of published poetry, a series of publicly performed pageants, and untold numbers of reports, proposals, memoranda, platforms, pamphlets, leaflets, book reviews, Crisis columns, and newspaper columns. His papers in various repositories contain works in progress and complete but unpublished essays, poems, plays, and books and short stories written between 1895 and the 1950s. Some are ephemeral in their relevance to readers in the early twenty-first century, and some set fundamental agendas that influenced debate and policies for years after their appearance. Some, like The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and Black Reconstruction (1935), are still cited by scholars for their insight into their subjects. Others, like his novels The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), Dark Princess (1928), and the Black Flame trilogy—The Ordeal of Mansart (1957), Mansart Builds a School (1959), and Worlds of Color (1961)—became the focus of increasingly intense interest by literary and cultural studies scholars in the opening decade of the twenty-first century. His life as a whole is the subject of an award-winning two-volume biography by David Levering Lewis (1993, 2000) and a political biography by Manning Marable (1986). The papers and writings were collected in several editions by Du Bois's literary executor Herbert Aptheker during the 1970s and 1980s, and there have been several focused studies of one or more aspects of Du Bois's career by several hands since his death.
