Biography: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart
In 2018, Jeffrey C. Stewart won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for his biography of Alain Locke, the founder of the Harlem Renaissance and mentor to Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and other important figures of Black culture in the Jazz Age. Jury members included John Matteson, who previously won the Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father; the Pulitzer committee calls Stewart’s work “a panoramic view of the personal trials and artistic triumphs of the father of the Harlem Renaissance and the movement he inspired.”
The New York Journal of Books calls Stewart’s book “a masterpiece of sustained craft, research, and historical scope.”
Biography finalists: Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris by Caroline Weber and The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot
