This edition of The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois is the first to be arranged and dedicated in accordance with Du Bois's manuscript notes. The Great Barrington Edition opens, as he intended, with the story of his birth and childhood in a small western Massachusetts town. It begins with these words: "I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation which began the freeing of American Negro Slaves."

Du Bois was born in the town where Berkshire Publishing Group is located. His autobiography tells the story of a little boy, the only Black boy in his school, who became the first African American PhD at Harvard, an educator, editor, and activist, and a writer of expressive, lyrical, and accessible prose. Our rearrangement of the chapters was made after we found a copy of the marked-up original manuscript for the book in the archives at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. That document shows how Du Bois had wanted the chapters ordered, and his changes to the dedication.

In the final chapters, he explains why he chose to become a communist. While the communism he praised did not turn out to offer the utopia so many hoped for, the problems he identified are still with us. His reasoning will resonant with modern readers who share his frustration with the continued inequities in our society.

His birthplace, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was a constant in his life, and his thinking on a broad range of issues has gained new attention in the twenty-first century. Each volume of David Levering Lewis's biography of Du Bois won a Pulitzer Prize.