Dumas Malone - Career

Career

Malone served on the faculty of Yale University, Columbia University, and the University of Virginia, where he was the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History. He was a Director of the Harvard University Press and served as editor of the original Dictionary of American Biography. His first contribution to historical scholarship was a still authoritative biography of the American political commentator and educator Thomas Cooper (Yale University Press, 1926).

He is best known for his six-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, published between 1948 and 1981, for which he earned the 1975 Pulitzer Prize. Among the many contributions of this authoritative study was Malone's inclusion in each volume of a detailed timeline of Jefferson's life. Malone's volumes were widely praised for their lucid and graceful writing style, for their rigorous and thorough scholarship, and for their attention to Jefferson's evolving constitutional and political thought. Later reviewers, however, faulted Malone for his tendency to adopt Jefferson's own perspective and thus to be insufficiently critical of his occasional political errors, faults, and lapses; for his bias in favor of Jefferson and against his principal adversaries Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and John Marshall; and for his failure to come to grips with Jefferson's life as a slaveowner and his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. Thus, Malone received considerable though balanced criticism in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), the first book by the historian Annette Gordon-Reed.

The six volumes, originally published by Atlantic/Little, Brown, and in 2005 republished by the University of Virginia Press, were:

• Jefferson the Virginian (1948)
• Jefferson and the Rights of Man (1951)
• Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (1962)
• Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805 (1970)
• Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805-1809 (1974)
• The Sage of Monticello (1981).

Malone also published a set of lectures, Thomas Jefferson as Political Leader, with the University of California Press in 1963.