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

Nov 29, 2025

Jonathan Eig, a bestselling biographer and former Wall Street Journal writer, delves into the complexities of Martin Luther King Jr. in his latest book. He discusses the importance of restoring King’s radical identity, often overshadowed by a simplified public image. Eig reveals King’s struggles with personal demons, the impact of his family background, and the challenges posed by the FBI. He also adds depth to Coretta Scott King’s role and highlights the nuanced relationship between King and Malcolm X. Eig emphasizes why King’s message remains urgent today.

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INSIGHT

Restore King's Intellectual Agency

Celebrating King risks making him a flattened symbol rather than a thinker and strategist.
Jonathan Eig argues we must return King's agency and re-engage his full writings to apply his ideas today.

ANECDOTE

Daddy King's Rise Shapes MLK

Daddy King rose from sharecropping to lead Ebenezer Baptist through sheer determination and self-education.
Jonathan Eig frames that ascent as central to the pressures and expectations placed on young Martin.

INSIGHT

Coretta's Untapped Activism

Coretta Scott King was an experienced activist frustrated by limited roles at home.
Eig emphasizes her importance and the tension between her desire to act and Martin's gendered expectations.

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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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