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

Nov 27, 2025

Jonathan Eig, a bestselling biographer known for his works on historical figures like Muhammad Ali, takes a deep dive into Martin Luther King Jr.'s life. He discusses the complexities of King's relationships, particularly with Coretta Scott King and his father. Eig uncovers the FBI's relentless campaign to discredit King and how it affected his mental health. He emphasizes King’s radical beliefs rooted in his faith and presents a nuanced view of his relationships with other Civil Rights leaders, including Malcolm X, making a case for why King's message is still urgent today.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

King Sanitized Into A Holiday Icon

Jonathan Eig argues Martin Luther King Jr. has been flattened into a sanitized national symbol that erases his radicalism.
Restoring King's full voice helps recover his intellectual and political urgency for today's struggles.

ANECDOTE

Daddy King's Rise And Pressure

Daddy King rose from sharecropping to become a prominent Atlanta pastor and pressured ML toward stability and success.
That push created lifelong tension as Martin felt the weight of his father's expectations.

INSIGHT

Coretta As Active, Frustrated Partner

Coretta Scott King was an experienced activist frustrated by restrictive gender roles in the movement.
Eig portrays her as a crucial partner who wanted to act more directly but was kept at home by expectations.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies