Dumas Malone: An Appreciation

Abstract

D UMAS Malone, who died at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, on December 27, i986, just two weeks before his ninety-fifth birthday, had varied academic career until at midpassage it converged on the biography of Thomas Jefferson and, in the end, was consumed by that work. The author completed what he called My Long Journey with Mr. Jefferson1 in i98i upon publication of the sixth and final volume ofJefferson and His Time. Generally esteemed the preeminent biography in early American history-some may say in all American history-Malone's work is destined to have enduring influence on the way people think about Jefferson and his time, and will likely remain the authoritative biography of its subject for generations to come. Born in Coldwater, Mississippi, in i892, the son of Methodist minister and schoolteacher mother with academic ambitions for her children, Dumas Malone grew up in rural Georgia and enrolled in Emory College, the forerunner of Emory University, at the tender age of fourteen. later years he fondly remembered the college as citadel of orthodoxy, yet a modest home of humane learning as well.2 He graduated as the youngest member of the Class of i9io but was otherwise undistinguished; after teaching school for several years, he went north to Yale Divinity School to study theology. Yale was liberating religiously and in every other way. In the free air of great university, Malone wrote in memoir left unfinished at his death, I gained intellectual independence.3 He earned the B.D. degree in i9i6 and took job at Randolph-Macon Woman's College teaching biblical literature. Eventually, Malone supposed, he would return to the divinity school for doctorate. His mother expected all her seven children to become Ph.Ds. Malone's elder brother, Kemp, set the pace. Always voracious student, he was Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Chicago. Within few years he would be an internationally recognized philologist and distinguished professor at the