David Herbert Donald

David Herbert Donald 1920-, American historian, b. Goodman, Miss. After receiving his Ph.D. from the Univ. of Illinois in 1946, he taught at Columbia (1947-49; 1951-59), Smith (1949-51), Princeton (1959-62), Johns Hopkins (1962-1972), and Harvard (1973-91; emeritus 1991-). An authority on the periods of the Civil War and Reconstruction, his biography of Charles Sumner received the 1960 Pulitzer Prize. Donald prepared a revised edition (1969) of J. G. Randall's standard work Civil War and Reconstruction (1937) and edited the Civil War diaries of Salmon P. Chase as Inside Lincoln's Cabinet (1954). His other works include Lincoln Reconsidered (1956, 2d enl. ed. 1966), Politics of Reconstruction, 1863-1867 (1965), Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (1970), Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (1987; Pulitzer 1988), and Lincoln (1995).

Donald, David Herbert (1920– ),born in Mississippi, has had an academic career at several institutions and written many books in his career as a historian. These include Lincoln's Herndon (1948); Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (1960), awarded a Pulitzer Prize for biography; The Nation in Crisis, 1861–1877 (1969); and Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (1987), also awarded a Pulitzer Prize for biography.