William Edward Burghardt Du Bois—the premier architect of the civil rights movement in America—was a towering and controversial personality, a fiercely proud individual blessed with the language of the poet and the impatience of the agitator. In the first of his superlative two-volume biography, renowned scholar David Levering Lewis chronicles the first five decades of Du Bois’s long and storied life, detailing in magisterial prose the momentous contributions to our national character that still echo today.