In fact, the epilogue offered a series of revelations: that the interviews, which took place late at night, when Malcolm was usually exhausted, often seemed more like interrogations or therapy sessions that when Haley served coffee he purposely provided only paper napkins, so he could later analyze Malcolm X’s doodlings that he kept two sets of notebooks, one for Malcolm X’s thoughts, one for his own. Nelson also praised Haley who, he said, provided “the great revelation” in an epilogue, written with Malcolm X’s permission but independent of his control.

Stone, in the New York Review of Books, predicting for it “a permanent place in the literature.” Enter also Truman Nelson, in the Nation, lauding “its dead-level honesty, its passion, its exalted purpose.” And when The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published, enter Eliot Fremont-Smith, in the New York Times, calling it “an eloquent testament.” And enter I. The Saturday Evening Post, though it had published an excerpt from the forthcoming Autobiography, eulogized him as “a violent and baffling young demagogue” and wondered “did he really have a major role to play?” Time magazine pronounced him “an unashamed demagogue” whose “gospel was hatred” and “creed was violence.” Doubleday terminated the contract for his autobiography.Įnter Grove Press.

On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated. A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, is available in paperback this spring. In the piece below, excerpted from A New Literary History of America, David Bradley considers the life of The Autobiography as spark of a movement, mainstay of colleges and prisons both, social science, prophecy, and postmodern literature.

Many of those stories are best known through Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malclom X, an absolute classic of American letters that now sees itself superseded as historical document by Marable’s work. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention gives us as clear a portrait of the man as we’re ever likely to have, and in the process sifts through many of the stories and myths that Malcolm X told about himself. This week the late Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X was quite rightly awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History.

The autobiography of malcolm x online