Author Johnathan Eig

After writing the best selling biographies of Mohammed Ali and Jackie Robinson, Jonathan Eig started the long journey to write a new biography about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Already many prize winning biographies have been written and yet this book brings new insights and new information. Johnathan researched all the original recordings and transcripts, and discovered that things that were printed in the newspapers, were not always true. 

Another finding was the story that world famous gospel singer Mahalia Jackson brought Dr. King to the idea to talk about the Dream at the historic March on Washington in August 28, 1963. Yes, she said 'Tell them about the dream, Martin', but that was after he already started his I have a dream-speech. Just like people in church respond to a sermon: "Tell me!", "Preach!", "Say it!". King knew what he did.

Johnathan Eig has been researching and writing for six years to get this masterpiece KING, A Life on the bookshelves. It was the right time, because he had the chance to interview many close friends of Dr. King, some who recently passed away. And people were able to speak more freely because of the time that has passed. 

The first full biography in decades, King mixes revelatory and exhaustive new research with brisk and accessible storytelling to forge the definitive life 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 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.
Buy this book! Also available as audiobook and soon available in Dutch and more languages.