The entire team at Authors Unbound would like to wish Jonathan Eig a huge congratulations on winning The Pulitzer Prize for his biography about Martin Luther King Jr., King: A Life.
“I have been a journalist since I was 16 and, you know, someone wrote in my high school yearbook that I’d win a Pulitzer someday, and I still can’t believe it actually happened. I am so proud of this book and so glad it received recognition. As Taylor Swift said, the work is the award. Still, the award is pretty nice.”
– Jonathan Eig, from The Chicago Tribune
Vividly written and exhaustively researched, 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 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.
