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A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958
by David Levering Lewis
National Humanities Medal recipient and two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize David Levering Lewis's own family history that shifts our understanding of the larger American story.
Sitting beneath a stained glass window dedicated to his grandmother in the Atlanta church where his family had prayed for generations, preeminent American historian David Levering Lewis was struck by the great lacunae in what he could know about his own ancestors. He vowed to excavate their past and tell their story.
There is no singular American story. Yet the Lewis family contains many defining ones. David Levering Lewis's lineage leads him to the Kings and Belvinses, two white slaveholding families in Georgia; to the Bells, a free persons of color slaveholding family in South Carolina; and to the Lewises, an up-from-slavery black family in Georgia.
Lewis's father, John Henry Lewis Sr., set Lewis on the path he pursues, introducing him to W. E. B. Du Bois and living by example as Thurgood Marshall's collaborator in a key civil rights case in Little Rock. In The Stained Glass Window, Lewis reckons with his legacy in full, facing his ancestors and all that was lost, all the doors that were closed to them.
In this country, the bonds of kinship and the horrific fetters of slavery are bound up together. The fight for equity, the loud echoes of the antebellum period in our present, and narratives of exceptionalism are ever with us; in these pages, so, too, are the voices of Clarissa, Isaac, Hattie, Alice, and John. They shaped this nation, and their heir David Levering Lewis's chronicle of the antebellum project and the subsequent era of marginalization and resistance will transform our understanding of it.
"In this intricate, sumptuously written account, Pulitzer winner Lewis offers a unique version of the American rags-to-riches story that shows how Black strivers had to navigate the nearly insurmountable obstacles and moral quandaries of slavery and Jim Crow in order to prosper...The result is a scintillating and piercing study of how the Black upper class emerged from a fraught system in which violence, family, and inheritance were intertwined." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Epic...Rich in family lore and historical fact, and a thoughtful addition to the literature of Black life in the American South." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Lewis' arresting discoveries, shared in elegantly lucid prose punctuated by deftly timed, mordant wit, brings his complex family history to life, including slaveholders who were white and people of color...His deeply investigated American family history is profoundly illuminating on many fronts." —Booklist (starred review)
"With the acumen of an award-winning historian, Lewis writes about his remarkable family's story of white enslavers and Black strivers as the nation's own." —Paula J. Giddings, E.A. Woodson Professor, emerita, Smith College and author of IDA, A Sword Among Lions
"There is a magisterial quality to all of David Levering Lewis's work. His two scintillating volumes on W.E.B. Du Bois offer a master class in the art of biography. Now in The Stained Glass Window, Lewis produces a meditation about race and family in America, chronicling his own family's rise from slavery. It's a genealogical tour de force and—no surprise!—it's magisterial, too." —Gary M. Pomerantz, author of Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn
"An epic narrative history, written with characteristic grace and insight, of a nation vainly obsessed with its supposed perfection but horribly disfigured by its contradictions—and of the singular, profoundly sympathetic family which emerged, against the odds, from the knee-buckling ironies and contingencies of American life. The Stained Glass Window left me breathless." —Matthew Guterl, author of Skinfolk
This information about The Stained Glass Window was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Levering Lewis is professor emeritus of history at New York University. A recipient of the National Humanities Medal, Lewis received the Pulitzer Prize for each volume of his W. E. B. Du Bois biography. He is the author of ten books. Lewis has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the Wilson Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the MacArthur Foundation. He lives in New York City.
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