Williams discovered Souls as an undergraduate. This was the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity … One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” It was here that Du Bois offered one of his first famous insights: the color line endowed Black Americans with the peculiar sensation of “double consciousness”. Williams writes that Du Bois portrayed his rival as anointed by white capitalists “North and South to legitimize the social, political and economic marginalization of the race”. Washington pleased white supremacists by declaring that “in all things purely social we can be as separate as the fingers”.

It also made Du Bois a declared enemy of Booker T Washington, who founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Combining “philosophical clairvoyance, historical audacity, literary imagination, sociological precision, autobiographical introspection, political urgency, musical lyricism, and poetic emotion”, it was “a text that defied classification”. One of the many pleasures of this volume is that author and subject are equally interesting writers.ĭu Bois established himself as a thoughtful radical and eager combatant with The Souls of Black Folk, an essay collection published in 1903, into which Williams says he poured “all his brilliance and anguish”. But Williams also includes the most important details of Du Bois’s life before and long after. Williams’s focus is Du Bois’s role in the first world war and the book about it which preoccupied him for many years, though he never managed to publish it. Besides his brilliance, he never shied away from friction: another useful quality for any good biographer. The first Black man to earn a Harvard PhD, Du Bois’s passion and thoughtfulness still make him America’s most important Black intellectual.

War of the worlds edward gorey