Ali: A Life

Jonathan Eig

oct 2017 · HarperCollins

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | Winner of the 2018 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing | Winner of The Times Sports Biography of the Year | The definitive biography of an American icon, from a best-selling author with unique access to Ali’s inner circle.

“As Muhammad Ali’s life was an epic of a life so Ali: A Life is an epic of a biography . . . for 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 a story about America, about race, about a brutal sport, and about a courageous man who shook up the world.

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JONATHAN EIG is the author of four critically acclaimed books, two of them New York Times bestsellers. He was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Monsey, New York. Eig is a former staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, and he remains a contributing writer there. He has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, the Washington Post, and other publications. He has appeared on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and in two Ken Burns films for PBS. He is currently working with Burns to develop a documentary on Muhammad Ali. He lives in Chicago, IL.