American historian, editor, and the author of an authoritative multivolume biography of Thomas Jefferson.

Malone was educated at Emory and Yale universities. He taught at Yale, Columbia, and the University of Virginia, where he was the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History. He edited the Dictionary of American Biography from 1929 to 1936 and the Political Science Quarterly from 1953 to 1958 and served as director of the Harvard University Press from 1936 to 1943. Malone's masterwork is Jefferson and His Time, a comprehensive, six-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, consisting of: Jefferson the Virginian (1948); Jefferson and the Rights of Man (1951); Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (1962); Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801–1805 (1970); Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805–1809 (1974); and The Sage of Monticello (1981).

Malone's other writings include The Public Life of Thomas Cooper (1926); Saints in Action (1939); and Empire for Liberty, 2 vol. (1960, with Basil Rauch).