
The Stained Glass Window
A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958
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Narrated by:
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Dion Graham
About this listen
“At once narrative history, family chronicle and personal memoir… [a] luminous work of investigation and introspection.”—Wall Street Journal
National Humanities Medal recipient and two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize David Levering Lewis’s own family history that shifts our understanding of the larger American story
Sitting beneath a stained glass window dedicated to his grandmother in the Atlanta church where his family had prayed for generations, preeminent American historian David Levering Lewis was struck by the great lacunae in what he could know about his own ancestors. He vowed to excavate their past and tell their story.
There is no singular American story. Yet the Lewis family contains many defining ones. David Levering Lewis’s lineage leads him to the Kings and Belvinses, two white slaveholding families in Georgia; to the Bells, a free persons of color slaveholding family in South Carolina; and to the Lewises, an up-from-slavery black family in Georgia.
Lewis’s father, John Henry Lewis Sr., set Lewis on the path he pursues, introducing him to W. E. B. Du Bois and living by example as Thurgood Marshall’s collaborator in a key civil rights case in Little Rock. In The Stained Glass Window, Lewis reckons with his legacy in full, facing his ancestors and all that was lost, all the doors that were closed to them.
In this country, the bonds of kinship and the horrific fetters of slavery are bound up together. The fight for equity, the loud echoes of the antebellum period in our present, and narratives of exceptionalism are ever with us; in this book, so, too, are the voices of Clarissa, Isaac, Hattie, Alice, and John. They shaped this nation, and their heir David Levering Lewis's chronicle of the antebellum project and the subsequent era of marginalization and resistance will transform our understanding of it.
©2025 David Levering Lewis (P)2025 Penguin AudioCritic reviews
"“Fascinating and important new audiobook . . . The stained-glass window of Lewis’s grandmother proves to be an apt metaphor for his book. One facet of stained glass is that the rigid panes capture and project an image of permanency—but time and light shift the hues. The same is true for American history. Artisans create stained glass by first sketching a full-scale design mapping out the composition and colors. Then they outline each section of glass like a puzzle. Finally, they carefully choose colored glass sheets for their hue and texture. In the same way, Lewis has combined colorful pieces of his family’s past and Southern history into a brilliant mosaic of the American story.” —Steve Majors, The Washington Post
“The Stained Glass Window is at once narrative history, family chronicle and personal memoir… A parade of Mr. Lewis’s relatives . . . march through his book and provide a vivid picture of the hard and heartbreaking challenges of black life in the U.S . . . But mostly there is Mr. Lewis himself—an indefatigable scholar, a double Pulitzer winner (for each of the Du Bois volumes), and a volunteer combatant in the war for historical racial justice. In a book in which he mined documents he also mined his own memory . . . The Chinese proverb has it that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. In this luminous work of investigation and introspection, a journey of more than 300 pages begins with a single glimpse of a church window.”—David M. Shribman, The Wall Street Journal
“Intricate, sumptuously written . . . An exquisite stylist and wide-ranging intellect . . . [The Stained Glass Window] is a scintillating and piercing study of how the Black upper class emerged from a fraught system in which violence, family, and inheritance were intertwined.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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