Malone, Dumas

At the time of his death late in 1986, Dumas Malone was acknowledged as the greatest scholar ever to study and write a biography of Thomas Jefferson. Born in Mississippi, educated at Emory and Yale, and a Marine Corps veteran of World War I, Malone was editor-in-chief of the scholarly"Dictionary of American Biography" and wrote a 15,000-word life of Jefferson as part of his editorial duties. From that first scholarly interest, Malone went on to write (between 1948 and 1981) a six-volume work, "Jefferson and His Time", that will long stand as the definitive biography of our third president.