King

Genre

Biography, Memoir & Autobiography

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Macmillan)

Publication year

2023

ISBN

9780374279295

King: A Life is a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. by the journalist Jonathan Eig, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May 2023. Drawing on recently declassified documents, it won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and was named a best book of 2023 by several publications.

Biographies of Martin Luther King Jr. risk turning a man into a monument, but Jonathan Eig's King: A Life restores the human being beneath the marble. Drawing on newly released FBI surveillance files, tapes and thousands of documents, Eig gives us King the strategist, the exhausted husband, the doubter and the radical whose late-career politics unsettled allies as much as enemies. The prose is propulsive and scrupulously sourced, moving from Montgomery to Memphis without ever coasting on reverence. intendle recommends it as the definitive modern life of King - a book that argues, persuasively, that we have sanded down a far more challenging figure into something safe. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, it is long but never slack, and it leaves readers with a King who is harder to quote and easier to understand.