King: a Life

WINNER OF THE 2024 PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY

A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award | Named one of the ten best books of 2023 by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Time

A New York Times bestseller and notable book of 2023 | One of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2023

One of The New Yorker’s essential reads of 2023 | A Christian Science Monitor best book of the year | One of Air Mail’s twelve best books of 2023

A Washington Post and national indie bestseller | One of Publishers Weekly’s best nonfiction books of 2023 | One of Smithsonian magazine’s ten best books of 2023

Hailed by The New York Times as “the new definitive biography,” King mixes revelatory new research with accessible storytelling to offer an MLK for our times.

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.—and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father—as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.

In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.

Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs