Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth trace this story through Locke’s Philadelphia upbringing, his undergraduate years at Harvard—where William James helped spark his influential engagement with pragmatism—and his tenure as the first African American Rhodes Scholar. The heart of their narrative illuminates Locke’s heady years in 1920s New York City and his forty-year career at Howard University, where he helped spearhead the adult education movement of the 1930s and wrote on topics ranging from the philosophy of value to the theory of democracy. Harris and Molesworth show that throughout this illustrious career—despite a formal manner that many observers interpreted as elitist or distant—Locke remained a warm and effective teacher and mentor, as well as a fierce champion of literature and art as means of breaking down barriers between communities.

The multifaceted portrait that emerges from this engaging account effectively reclaims Locke’s rightful place in the pantheon of America’s most important minds.

“This is the definitive biography of the towering cultural critic and pioneering Afro-American philosopher Alain Locke. The intellectual subtlety and meticulous work of Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth forever puts Locke on our academic radar screen!”

“The absence of a genuine biography of a cultural critic and leader as important as Alain Locke has been a virtual tragedy for serious students of the Harlem Renaissance and the broader question of multiculturalism in America. Because Locke was among the most educated and articulate voices in these and other areas, the need for an authoritative study of his life and times has been urgent. Now the void has been filled with this richly documented, intelligently argued, and commendably expansive study.”

“Alain Locke was not only one of the intellectual parents of the Harlem Renaissance, he was also the preeminent African American philosopher of his generation. This first biography offers crucial insights into the life of a great black intellectual.”

"Contemporary scholars tend to simplify by casting him either as a race man or an apolitical aesthete. Yet in fact, as Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth show, Locke kept up the pressure on both roles, as his thought continually refined itself and deepened. . . . The current neglect of Alain Locke should not make us skeptical of the claim made by [Harris and Molesworth], who call him 'the most influential African American intellectual born between W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr.' They are right."

2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

"A valuable resource on Locke and the history of African-American thought."