The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (National Book Award Winner)

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (National Book Award Winner)

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (National Book Award Winner)

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (National Book Award Winner)

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Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

One the of most fascinating historical figures of the 20th century, Malcolm X seems often more a reflection of the politics of the viewer than the reality of the man. Les Payne's three decades of meticulous investigative research, however, have rectified this in a brilliantly singular, nuanced biography of an extraordinary, entirely human individual. With fresh insight and a grippingly narrative voice, The Dead Are Arising is truly masterful.

WINNER • 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY • WINNER — 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION • TIME Magazine — 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2020 • A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 and Editors' Choice Selection • Best Books of 2020: NPR, Washington Post, Library Journal, Chicago Public Library • Excerpted in The New Yorker • Longlisted — Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Best Books of Fall 2020 — O, the Oprah Magazine, The Week, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

An epic biography of Malcolm X finally emerges, drawing on hundreds of hours of the author’s interviews, rewriting much of the known narrative.

Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X—all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates, street friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam figures, FBI moles and cops, and political leaders around the world. His goal was ambitious: to transform what would become over a hundred hours of interviews into an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction.

The result is this historic biography that conjures a never-before-seen world of its protagonist, a work whose title is inspired by a phrase Malcolm X used when he saw his Hartford followers stir with purpose, as if the dead were truly arising, to overcome the obstacles of racism. Setting Malcolm’s life not only within the Nation of Islam but against the larger backdrop of American history, the book traces the life of one of the twentieth century’s most politically relevant figures “from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary.”

In tracing Malcolm X’s life from his Nebraska birth in 1925 to his Harlem assassination in 1965, Payne provides searing vignettes culled from Malcolm’s Depression-era youth, describing the influence of his Garveyite parents: his father, Earl, a circuit-riding preacher who was run over by a street car in Lansing, Michigan, in 1929, and his mother, Louise, who continued to instill black pride in her children after Earl’s death. Filling each chapter with resonant drama, Payne follows Malcolm’s exploits as a petty criminal in Boston and Harlem in the 1930s and early 1940s to his religious awakening and conversion to the Nation of Islam in a Massachusetts penitentiary.

With a biographer’s unwavering determination, Payne corrects the historical record and delivers extraordinary revelations—from the unmasking of the mysterious NOI founder “Fard Muhammad,” who preceded Elijah Muhammad; to a hair-rising scene, conveyed in cinematic detail, of Malcolm and Minister Jeremiah X Shabazz’s 1961 clandestine meeting with the KKK; to a minute-by-minute account of Malcolm X’s murder at the Audubon Ballroom.

Introduced by Payne’s daughter and primary researcher, Tamara Payne, who, following her father’s death, heroically completed the biography, The Dead Are Arising is a penetrating and riveting work that affirms the centrality of Malcolm X to the African American freedom struggle.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781631491665
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date: 10/20/2020
Pages: 640
Sales rank: 217,478
Product dimensions: 9.30(w) x 6.40(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Les Payne (1941–2018) was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist. He served as an editor and columnist at Newsday and was a founder of the National Association of Black Journalists.

 



Tamara Payne acted as Les Payne’s principal researcher. She lives in New York.
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