King: A Life

Jonathan Eig is an American journalist and author. He gained prominence through his biographies of sports figures such as Lou Gehrig (2005), Jackie Robinson (2007), and Muhammad Ali (2017), the last of which is a major source for an upcoming Ken Burns documentary. Eig has also written on the plot to capture Al Capone and the history of the birth control pill. Growing up near New York City, he attended the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and worked as a reporter for outlets such as the Dallas Morning News and the Wall Street Journal. He has also been a professor of journalism at Columbia’s Chicago campus and Northwestern. He has made several appearances on television, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and PBS documentaries.

While all of Eig’s books have won critical acclaim, King: A Life has been hailed as the most significant biography of King in three decades. Nominated for the National Book Award, it was Amazon’s Best Biography of the Year, and won praise from critics across the world, Barack Obama, and the director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. Eig lives with his wife, Jennifer Tescher, and their three children in Chicago.