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. This monumental biography - eight years in the research and writing - treats the early and middle phases of a long and intense career: a crucial fifty-year period that demonstrates how Du Bois changed forever the way Americans think about themselves.