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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Memoirs

KING

Jonathan Eig

Martin Luther King Jr. was the courageous and brilliant leader of the American civil rights movement, but today many Americans know nothing about him beyond four syllables: "I have a dream." When we turn true heroes into superheroes, when we simplify the lives of great men and women in order to make their lessons easier to digest, we fail to honor them. Books have their moments. Now is the time for a comprehensive biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

It has been thirty-six years since the last full biography of him. The timing for a book about King could not be better: thousands of documents have been released by the FBI regarding King; many of his friends, followers and confidants are eager to talk, and nearing a point in their lives where, if they aren't heard soon, their stories will be lost for good. Yes, there have been books about King: Taylor Branch wrote of King's leadership in the civil rights movement in PARTING THE WATERS; David Garrow wrote about his years with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in BEARING THE CROSS; Michael Eric Dyson wrote I MAY NOT GET THERE WITH YOU, a critical assessment of King's career and his impact, told in a series of essays. But in the thirty-six years since the last full biography of King was published, a plethora of new primary documents have become available and our understanding of King the man has fundamentally changed. The new materials include the 102 interviews with King contemporaries conducted between 2010 and 2016 for the Civil Rights History Project at the National Museum of African American History and Culture; more than 100 interview transcripts from the 1987 documentary EYES ON THE PRIZE; handwritten notes from James Baldwin; an interview from 1964 taken by the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren; as well as the tens of thousands of newly released FBI documents. Some of King's contemporaries, including Harry Belafonte and Andrew Young, have already provided Jonathan with interviews for this new look at King's life. Rev. Jesse Jackson, Cong. John Lewis, and Diane Nash are among those who have promised interviews. This book will also draw on recent research suggesting that King battled depression, taking advantage of thousands of newly archived personal letters written by King, his friends, and colleagues, including a collection of newly discovered letters that King wrote to his first biographer, Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, in 1958. Jonathan Eig is the New York Times best-selling author of five critically acclaimed books. His most recent book, ALI: A LIFE, was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. It has also been long-listed for the Plutarch Prize for biography and the 2018 PEN/ESPN Award for literary sports writing. The Wall Street Journal named it one of the ten best non-fiction books of 2017, Smithsonian called it one of the ten best books of the year, and Sports Illustrated called it the best book of 2017. Eig's first book, LUCKIEST MAN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LOU GEHRIG, won the Casey Award for best baseball book of 2005. Eig is a former senior special reporter at The Wall Street Journal. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, and The New Republic. He has been featured on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, CBS Sunday Morning, The Today Show, and dozens of other network programs. He is also listed as one of the primary sources in Ken Burns' documentary on Prohibition as well as in Burns' documentary on Jackie Robinson. He is currently working as senior creative producer with Burns on multi-part Muhammad Ali documentary. Eig is also working with Morgan Freeman and CBS Studios to develop an eight-part television series based on the life of Ali. Eig's birth-control pill book is under option by Nat Geo for a television series, and his Lou Gehrig book is in development as a major motion picture.

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Book Published 2023-05-16 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Comments

Definitive . . . Monumental . . . An extraordinary achievement and an essential life of the iconic warrior for social justice.

Jonathan Eig's book is the most comprehensive and original King biography to appear in over 35 years. Digitization and the web have made a slew of new documentary resources available, and Eig has mined them superbly. He is thus able to paint the first 25 years of King's life more richly than ever before, and to offer fuller portraits of three of the most important people in King's adult life: his wife Coretta and his closest male and female companions, Ralph Abernathy and Dorothy Cotton. The result is a great leap forward in our biographical understanding.

King: A Life might be described as a deeply reported psychobiography [. . .] infused with the narrative energy of a thriller . . . Eig does a particularly nuanced job of conjuring up the mind-set of Coretta Scott King in the years before she emerged as a forceful activist in her own right . . . The most compelling account of King's life in a generation.

King: A Life, is more than up to the challenge. It will take its place among the foremost of the many treatments of King . . . A moving, and in places beautiful, account of King's life.

A sober and intimate portrait of King's short life . . . Eig captures the ferocity of the forces that opposed King . . . He also captures King's sense of theatre, his enormously canny ability to stage confrontations that heightened the contrast between the civil-rights movement and the people who wanted to stop it.

With the detective mind of an historian, the lyrical precision of a poet, and the techniques of a master storyteller, Jonathan Eig makes Martin Luther King, Jr. come alive as a complex personality. He retrieves King's extraordinary gifts, incurable optimism, and amazing heroism as a leader while not ignoring his frailties, doubts, and vulnerabilities. This book is a perceptive and necessary contribution to the biography genre in King studies.

Mining a trove of materialsmany only recently availableaugmented with voluminous archival work and hundreds of interviews for personal insights . . . [Eig] recovers the man, foibles and all, from the too often hollowed-out, sainted symbol that competing ideologies have sanitized for national observance . . . Engrossing . . . A must for readers interested in moving beyond clichéd catchphrases to see a more complete and complex King.

Eig brilliantly portrays the many dimensions of the civil rights leader . . . Eig's balanced treatment of King's manifest greatness and his human flaws, including his sexual infidelity, turns an icon back into a man and produces a biography that will be very difficult to surpass.

[A] sweeping biography. Eig gives a rousing recap of King's triumphs as a civil rights leader . . . [A] complex, nuanced portrait . . . Eig's evocative prose ably conveys his bravery, charisma, and spell-binding oratory . . . An enthralling reappraisal that confirms King's relevance to today's debates over racial justice.

No book could be more timely than Jonathan Eig's sweeping and majestic new King . . . The result is not mythology but a portrait of a man who was all too humanmaking his remarkable moral choices and struggles relatable to his fellow mortals. In repositioning King as one of America's true Founding Fathers, Eig has created 2023?s most vital tome.

King is a deeply absorbing, powerful lens for examining the Civil Rights Movement. Jonathan Eig's compelling look back reveals a complex leader, driven by his faith and an unflinching determination to stamp out racial injustice, yet dogged by personal conflicts and relentless secret government efforts to discredit him.

Jonathan Eig's King is an exemplary masterclass in biography: Eig's knowledge of the subject matter is scholarly, his discovery of new and untapped historical sources is relentless, and his prose is gripping. This is a captivating story of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: a child scarred by pervasive racism, a man haunted by racist violence and death threats, a minister hunted by his own federal government, a human being afflicted by all-too-common human frailties, and a citizen who somehow managed to have an uncommon Christian faith and the courage to speak truth to power. Eig's King is not just a welcomed contribution to MLK biography, but also a call to confront our own humanity, and a summons to bear witness against the societal evils that plagued King's time and persist in our own.

UK: Simon & Schuster; Netherlands: Overamstel; Germany: DVA/PRH; Denmark: Klim; Brazil: Companhia das; Poland: Znak; China (simplified characters): United Sky; Norway: Verbum; Japan: Akishobo; Sweden: Textat; Korea: Book 21 Italy: Feltrinelli

In this biography, his sixth book, Eig writes like an Olympic diver who jackknifes off the high board, slicing the water without a ripple. He performs with sheer artistry, like Picasso paints and Astaire dances.

The first major biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in over a generation, King is a major achievement. With eloquence, compassion, and grace, Jonathan Eig offers a stirringly contemporary and complex portrait of a fully humanand humaneKing, whose contradictions, frailties, and shortcomings worked in tandem with his brilliance, resilience, and genius to fundamentally transform American democracy and the world. King brilliantly recovers the defiantly courageous, radically democratic, and revolutionary anti-racist, anti-poverty, and anti-war activist who inspired as much hate and revulsion as he did love and compassion. A resounding triumph.

Supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling and compulsively readable . . . The first comprehensive biography of King in three decades . . . and it supplants David J. Garrow's 1986 biography Bearing the Cross as the definitive life of King, as Garrow himself deposed recently . . . [Eig's is] a clean, clear, journalistic voice, one that employs facts the way Saul Bellow said they should be employed, each a wire that sends a current . . . Eig's book is worthy of its subject.

Outstanding . . . [Eig] shows who King really was behind the famous speeches and celebrity . . . Eig offers an intimate, multidimensional biography . . . Most importantly, Eig weaves Coretta Scott King's impressions of her famous husband throughout the book in ways that free her from the traditional housewife image depicted in Time magazine portraits . . . King: A Life forces readers to view King as more than a martyr, icon, or saint to see him for who he was, instead of who people thought he was, or wanted him to be.

Groundbreaking . . . King is such a nuanced, detailed biography, it's like having Martin Luther King sitting in your living room.

[Eig] is an indefatigable researcher, and King is based on a vast array of material, old and new . . . Eig offers affecting accounts of the Montgomery bus boycott, which made King a national figure; the confrontation in the streets of Birmingham between young Black demonstrators and 'Bull' Connor's dogs and fire hoses; and the march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery . . . [His] style is journalistic, with brief paragraphs driving the narrative forward . . . Eig devotes more attention to Coretta Scott King than previous biographers, emphasising that she was an anti-racist radical in her own right.

Drawing on recently released FBI files, telephone recordings and interviews for this first full-scale biography in decades, Eig acknowledges King's frailties and failures, as well as his radical critique of economic inequality and the war in Vietnam . . . Eig enriches [the] familiar narrative of King's activism with moving stories.

The most comprehensive MLK biography to date . . . Eig refuses to 'defang' King, instead pushing Americans to recognize the radical nature of his demands for justice and his resistance to not only racism but militarism and capitalism.

Jonathan Eig's biography of Martin Luther King Jr. is destined to be a classic. Eig elegantly depicts King's life with a sensitivity and intimacy making him more than a static icon. In this biography filled with exhaustive interviews and wonderfully written vignettes, King is placed in the context of community, family, and friends, showing his powerful strengths and his all too human flaws. Most importantly, Eig depicts King's single-minded commitment to radically transforming the United States from an unjust republic based on a hierarchy of race and wealth to one that encompasses the dreams of all God's children. I hope it is read by everyone.

Greatness and opacity more often than not seem to go hand in hand: the most important among us seem out of reach, inscrutable, indifferent to our entreaties for human detail beyond the sensational or salacious. But here, Eig has pulled off a kind of miracle. Here is the King we know, think we know and ought to know. Here is the leader, the preacher, the orator, the husband, the father, the martyr, the human beingnot with melodramatic halo in place, but in all his heroic, tragic Glory. Hallelujah!

Finally, a biography of King that takes seriously Coretta Scott King's political, intellectual and personal contributions.

Eig has used his sharp journalistic eye to spin a powerful story of King and the movements in which he participated . . . [King] stirs a whirlwind of exhilarating feelings . . . Essential . . . A beautiful book that requires every reader to grapple with both the contradictions and the glory of one of our leading historical protagonists for peace, freedom, economic justice, and equality.

Eig is particularly effective at gently reminding readers that there are striking parallels between the way racial justice was framed in the 1950s and '60s and the way it is framed in the 2010s and '20s . . . Jonathan Eig has written a biography that points us to King at his best, to King convinced that words bear truth, that narrative moves us toward goodness, and that memory, well preserved, carries beauty that motivates and inspires.

Jonathan Eig's book comes at a crucial time for our country. With the gains we've made for civil rights and workers' rights under constant threat, Eig reminds us that, in Dr. King's own words, 'progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.'

Eig's monumental work, the first major biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades, challenges the image of him as a peaceful advocate of incremental change. There's plenty of new detail, including from recently declassified F.B.I. files, allowing King to emerge as a complex, humane figure.

Jonathan Eig's magnificent new biography is an overdue attempt to grapple with King in all his complexity. His book will inevitably draw comparisons with America in the King Years . . . [King: A Life] is a more traditional biography, and the book benefits from its narrower focus. It gives the reader more insight into the multifaceted man himself. . . . Eig makes [King's] courage and moral vision seem all the more exceptional for having come from a man with ordinary flaws.