Web du bois biography of a race

This is a biography that actually merits the “magisterial” among its blurbs, the kind of book that shows biography second only to the novel for difficulty of organization and effect.

As epigraph to the first of the five volumes he would devote to the life of Henry James, Leon Edel quoted a line from his subject’s rare foray into biography (William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 1903):

To live other people’s lives is nothing unless we live over their perceptions, live over the growth, the change, the varying intensity of the same—since it was by these things they themselves lived.

Du Bois began his intellectual life in the 1870s, a prodigious New England preteen saving odd job money to buy Macaulay’s History of England on an installment plan—and died in 1963, a Pan-Africanist Marxist with a villa in Accra, capital of newly-independent Ghana, and a chauffeured limousine provided by the Soviet embassy.

So yeah, L