On April 18, 1903, A.C. McClurg and Company of Chicago published The Souls of Black Folk, just two months after the author's thirty-fifth birthday. Between 1903 and 1905, no less than six printings of the book were necessary to satisfy demand. Despite his young age, the author, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963), had become by the turn of the century "one of the two or three best-known Afro-Americans in the nation," as the historian Herbert Aptheker accurately observes. Indeed, Du Bois's emergence as a dominant political figure in the Afro-American community is without parallel in the history of black leadership, because his vehicle to prominence was the written word.