#jonathan eig

Now Available in Paperback: The Definitive Biography of an American Icon

Winner of the 2018 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing Winner of The Times Sports Biography of the Year “As Muhammad Ali’s life was an epic of a life so Ali: A Life is an epic of a biography . . . pages in succession its narrative reads like a novel—a suspenseful novel with a cast of vivid characters.” – Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times Book Review   Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Clay in racially segregated Louisville, Kentucky, the son of a sign painter and a housekeeper. He went on to become a heavyweight boxer with a dazzling mix of power and speed, a warrior for racial pride, a comedian, a preacher, a poet, a draft resister, an actor, and a lover. Millions hated him when he changed his religion, changed his name, and refused to fight in the Vietnam War. He fought his way back, winning hearts, but at great cost.

Jonathan Eig, hailed by Ken Burns as one of America’s master storytellers, sheds important new light on Ali’s politics, religion, personal life, and neurological condition through unprecedented access to all the key people in Ali’s life, more than 500 interviews and thousands of pages of previously unreleased FBI and Justice Department files and audiotaped interviews from the 1960s.

ALI: A Life is the first complete, unauthorized biography of one of the twentieth century's most fantastic figures: Muhammad Ali. Based on more than 500 interviews with almost all of Ali’s surviving associates, and enhanced by the author’s discovery of thousands of pages of FBI records and newly uncovered Ali interviews from the 1960s, this is the stunning portrait of a man who became a legend.

"Eig tells the life story of the legendary boxer, political radical, and hero in all its complexity.” —Entertainment Weekly, Fall's 20 Must-Read Books

"Finally, after so many works focusing on this fight or that, the whole man, the whole life, is presented here. And what a revelation it is—to be able to see how this remarkable man was shaped by his world, and how that world was, in turn, profoundly influenced by this exceptional and complicated kid from Louisville."  —Ken Burns

"Stop the fight. It’s over. Eig in a knockout.”—Jane Leavy, author of Sandy Koufax and The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood

Preorder now:

King: a life by Jonathan Eig

King: A Life