Dumas Malone (January 10, 1892 – December 27, 1986) was an American historian, biographer, and editor noted for his six-volume biography on Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson and His Time, for which he received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for history. In 1983 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Born at Coldwater, Mississippi, Malone received his bachelor's degree in 1910 from Emory College (Emory University). In 1916 he received his divinity degree from Yale University. Between 1917 and 1919 during the First World War, he became a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. Following the war, he returned to Yale University where he obtained his Master's (1921) and doctorate (1923) degrees. He won the John Addison Porter prize in 1923 for his dissertation The Public Life of Thomas Cooper, 1783-1839 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926).
Malone served on the faculty of Yale University, Columbia University, and the University of Virginia, where he was the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History. He was a Director of the Harvard University Press and served as editor of the original Dictionary of American Biography. His first contribution to historical scholarship was a still authoritative biography of the American political commentator and educator Thomas Cooper (Yale University Press, 1926).