Dumas Malone (; January 10, 1892 – December 27, 1986) was an American historian, minister, and biographer. A professor by occupation, Malone spent the majority of his career teaching at the University of Virginia (UVA), where he served as the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History.
Malone was best known for his six-volume biography, Jefferson and His Time, for which he received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for History. Completed in 1981, the series became Malone's defining work and is considered the foremost authoritative biography of Thomas Jefferson. Before beginning a lifelong career as a biographer, he was editor-in-chief of the twenty-volume Dictionary of American Biography and the third director of the Harvard University Press. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Early life and education
Upbringing
Malone was born in Coldwater, Mississippi, on January 10, 1892, to clergyman John W. Malone (1856–1930) and suffragist schoolteacher Lillian Kemp. He was raised in a poor, religious household from the Deep South and his grandfather was a Confederate veteran who served in the American Civil War. His mother and father were educators who recognized the value of an intellectual upbringing; his mother fostered his early disposition for reading, and his father served as an academic at various educational institutions. though otherwise graduated from the college relatively undistinguished. Regardless, he later fondly remembered Emory as a "modest home of humane learning." When the college inducted him into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society in 1930, Malone remarked, "That was lucky for me. I am sure they did not pay much attention to my old undergraduate record. I was too busy exploring life to do full justice to my studies."thumb|321x321px|Malone as a young professor of mathematics at Andrew College, pictured in a 1912 edition of [[The Atlanta Georgian ]]
Ministry and Yale
Malone initially sought to study religion and enter the ministry upon graduating. at Randolph-Macon Woman's College, where two of his sisters had been educated.
After spending a year at Vanderbilt University, Malone enrolled in Yale Divinity School where he excelled academically, obtaining a Fogg scholarship