Jonathan Eig, "King: A Life" (FSG, 2023)

Nov 27, 2025

Jonathan Eig, a bestselling biographer and former Wall Street Journal writer, brings fresh insights into Martin Luther King Jr.'s life with his latest work. He discusses the sanitized public image of King, revealing the complexities of his personal struggles and family dynamics. Eig explores the dark history of FBI surveillance aimed at undermining King, and how these pressures impacted his mental health. He also emphasizes the urgency of King's messages on racial and economic justice, making them relevant to today's societal challenges.

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INSIGHT

King Sanitized Into A Symbol

Jonathan Eig argues Martin Luther King Jr. has been overly sanitized into a comforting national symbol.
Eig wants readers to re-engage with King's full writings and radical commitments to understand his true message.

ANECDOTE

Daddy King's Self-Made Rise

Daddy King walked to Atlanta at age 12, taught himself to read, and became a pastor who lifted his family.
Jonathan Eig frames Daddy King's rise as central to MLK's expectations and the son's complicated relationship with his father.

INSIGHT

Coretta's Activism And Frustration

Eig depicts Coretta Scott King as an activist frustrated by gender expectations in Martin's life.
Coretta wanted to protest and go to jail, but King insisted she stay home, creating lasting marital tension.

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Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King: A Life (FSG, 2023) 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.

Jonathan Eig is a former senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several books, including two highly acclaimed bestsellers, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig and Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season. Visit him at JonathanEig.com.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

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