Monday lecture with Jonathan Eig

Summer Lecture Series

July 29, 2024

4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Jonathan Eig is the bestselling author of six books, including his most recent, King: A Life (2023), which The New York Times hailed as the "definitive" biography of Martin Luther King Jr.—the first to include recently declassified FBI files. Nominated for the National Book Award, King: A Life is a revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world. Eig gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled man who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father—as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.

The Mount’s general COVID-19 Health and Safety Guidelines can be found here.

The Mount is a Massachusetts Cultural Council UP designated organization welcoming participants of all disabilities. Please contact The Mount at 413-551-5100 or by email, info@edithwharton.org, to discuss accommodations needed to participate fully in this event.

Thanks to our sponsors:

Carol & Richard Seltzer

  • Sales for all lectures will open for Mount Members on Friday, May 10, and to the general public on Wednesday, May 15. Prices are $25 (Mount Members) and $30 (General Admission). All lectures and panel discussions are free for graduate and undergraduate students, and children under 18. Check back to book online!
  • All lectures will take place in an outdoor, open-sided tent. We look forward to seeing you rain or shine.
  • Books are available for purchase through The Mount's Bookstore before and during the event.

Jonathan Eig is the bestselling author of six books, including his most recent, King: A Life (2023), which The New York Times hailed as the “definitive” biography of Martin Luther King Jr. King: A Life was nominated for the National Book Award. Eig’s previous book, Ali: A Life, won a 2018 PEN America Literary Award. His works have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He served as consulting producer for the PBS series “Muhammad Ali,” which was directed by Ken Burns. Esquire magazine named Ali: A Life (2017) is one of the 25 greatest biographies of all time. Eig’s first book, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig (2005), reached #10 on the New York Times bestseller list and won the Casey Award. His books have been listed among the best of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. His fourth book, The Birth of the Pill (2014), will be staged soon as a theatrical production by TimeLine Theatre in Chicago. Eig began his writing career at age 16, working for his hometown newspaper, The Rockland County (N.Y.) Journal News. He studied journalism at Northwestern University and went on to work as a reporter for The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Dallas Morning News, Chicago Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. He’s appeared on the Today Show, NPR’s Fresh Air, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. But his greatest claim to fame, according to his parents, is that his name once appeared in a Jeopardy question, (which was solved correctly for $200). He lives in Chicago with his wife and children and shares office space with the laundry machines.

Reviews
“Greatness and opacity more often than not seem to go hand in hand:  the most important among us seem out of reach, inscrutable, indifferent to our entreaties for human detail beyond the sensational or salacious.  But, here, Eig has pulled off a kind of miracle.  Here is the King we know, think we know and ought to know.  Here is the leader, the preacher, the orator, the husband, the father, the martyr, the human being—not with melodramatic halo in place, but in all his heroic, tragic Glory.  Hallelujah!”
— ​Ken Burns
“A sober and intimate portrait of King’s short life…”
— Kalefa Sanneh, The New Yorker
“Supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling and compulsively readable . . .[Eig’s is] a clean, clear, journalistic voice, one that employs facts the way Saul Bellow said they should be employed, each a wire that sends a current . . . Eig’s book is worthy of its subject.”
— ​Dwight Garner, The New York Times​

“​Definitive . . . Monumental . . . An extraordinary achievement and an essential life of the iconic warrior for social justice.”
— ​Kirkus Reviews