Ali: A Life
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | Winner of the 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, Pulitzer Prize-winning author with unique access to Ali’s inner circle.

"Finally Muhammad Ali has a biography as big, complex, and memorable as the man himself." —T.J. Stiles, author of Custer's Trials and The First Tycoon 

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.

“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

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Ali: A Life
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | Winner of the 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, Pulitzer Prize-winning author with unique access to Ali’s inner circle.

"Finally Muhammad Ali has a biography as big, complex, and memorable as the man himself." —T.J. Stiles, author of Custer's Trials and The First Tycoon 

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.

“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

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Ali: A Life

Ali: A Life

by Jonathan Eig
Ali: A Life

Ali: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

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Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | Winner of the 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, Pulitzer Prize-winning author with unique access to Ali’s inner circle.

"Finally Muhammad Ali has a biography as big, complex, and memorable as the man himself." —T.J. Stiles, author of Custer's Trials and The First Tycoon 

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.

“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


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780594013297
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date: 10/03/2017
Pages: 640
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.10(d)

About the Author

About The Author
JONATHAN EIG is the author of five critically acclaimed books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner King: A Life. 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 also worked with Burns to develop a documentary on Muhammad Ali that aired in 2021. He lives in Chicago, IL.

Table of Contents

Preface: Miami, 1964 ix

Part I

1 Cassius Marcellus Clay 3

2 The Loudest Child 7

3 The Bicycle 20

4 "Every Day Was Heaven" 29

5 The Prophet 44

6 "I'm Just Young and Don't Give a Damn" 53

7 America's Hero 60

8 Dreamer 68

9 "Twentieth-Century Exuberance" 86

10 "It's Show Business" 96

11 Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee 113

12 The Ugly Bear 128

13 "So What's Wrong with the Muslims?" 133

14 Becoming Muhammad Ali 152

15 Choice 164

16 "Girl, Will You Marry Me?" 170

17 Assassination 179

18 Phantom Punch 187

19 True Love 193

20 A Holy War 202

21 No Quarrel 211

22 "What's My Name?" 220

23 "Against the Furies" 228

Part II

24 Exile 237

25 Faith 242

26 Martyr 252

27 Song and Dance and Prayer 266

28 The Greatest Book of All Time 275

29 Stand by Me 279

30 Comeback 285

31 "The World Is Watching You" 297

32 A Different Fighter 299

33 The Five-Million-Dollar Match 306

34 Ali v. Frazier 313

35 Freedom 321

36 Trickeration 335

Part III

37 A Fight to the Finish 351

38 Heart of Darkness 361

39 Fighter's Heaven 370

40 "Ali Boma Ye!" 380

41 Rumble in the Jungle 392

42 Moving on Up 403

43 Impulses 415

44 Ali-Frazier III 425

45 Getting Old 431

46 "They May Not Let Me Quit" 435

47 "Do You Remember Muhammad Ali?" 446

48 Staggered 453

49 Crown Prince 459

50 Old 466

51 Humpty Dumpty 475

52 The Last Hurrah 490

53 Too Many Punches 499

54 "He's Human, Like Us" 509

55 A Torch 520

56 The Long, Black Cadillac 526

Postscript 538

Acknowledgments 540

Notes 543

Appendix: Career Record 605

Index 608

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