Dumas Malone is an educator, historian, and editor who excels in the biographical method of writing history. His first concern is to get the facts straight. His second is to report events in the context of their own time. His third is always to be honest and fair-minded about his subjects, never the prosecutor or defender of them. By utilizing these principles, he has set a high standard for twentieth-century biographical writing.

Dumas Malone was born to John W. and Lillian Kemp Malone in the small northwestern Mississippi town of Coldwater. He spent the first ten years of his life in Mississippi before his father moved the family to Cuthbert, Georgia. There John Malone, a Methodist minister, assumed the presidency of Andrew College, a small school for women.

Education and religion played key roles in the Malone household. Lillian Malone taught her children at home, and the educational...