Louis Harlan, Pulitzer-winning historian, dies at 87

Louis R. Harlan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at the University of Maryland whose two-volume biography of Booker T. Washington made him one of the nation's foremost scholars of the history of race relations, died Jan. 22 at a nursing facility in Lexington, Va., of Crohn's disease. He was 87.

Harlan, who taught at Maryland for more than 25 years, devoted much of his scholarly career to Washington, who was born into slavery in Virginia in 1856, led the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and was perhaps the country's most prominent black leader at the start of the 20th century.

The first volume of Harlan's biography, "Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901," came out in 1972 and was awarded the Bancroft Prize, the most prestigious annual honor in the field of American history. After the second volume, "Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915" was published in 1983, Harlan won the Pulitzer Prize for biography, a second Bancroft Prize and the Albert J. Beveridge Award for the best book on American history.

Survivors include his wife of 62 years, Sadie Morton Harlan of Lexington; two sons; and a sister.

The Washington Post