 Handlin won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for History for "The Uprooted" (1951).Handlin's 1965 testimony before Congress was said to "have played an important role" in passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that abolished the discriminatory immigration quota system in the U.S.

Handlin was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 29, 1915, the eldest of three children of Russian-Jewish immigrants.His mother, the former Ida Yanowitz, came to the United States in 1904 and worked in the garment industry.