The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Published posthumously, The Autobiography of Malcolm X is an account of the life of Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little (1925–1965), who became a human rights activist. Beginning with his mother's pregnancy, the book describes Malcolm's childhood first in Omaha, Nebraska and then in the area around Lansing and Mason, Michigan, the death of his father under questionable circumstances, and his mother's deteriorating mental health that resulted in her commitment to a psychiatric hospital. X's young adulthood in Boston and New York City is covered, as well as his involvement in organized crime. This led to his arrest and subsequent eight- to ten-year prison sentence, of which he served six-and-a-half years (1946–1952). The book addresses his ministry with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam (1952–1963) and his emergence as the organization's national spokesman. It documents his disillusionment with and departure from the Nation of Islam in March 1964, his pilgrimage to Mecca, which catalyzed his conversion to orthodox Sunni Islam, and his travels in Africa. Malcolm X was assassinated in New York's Audubon Ballroom in February 1965, before the book was finished. His co-author, the journalist Alex Haley, summarizes the last days of Malcolm X's life, and describes in detail their working agreement, including Haley's personal views on his subject, in the Autobiographys epilogue. == Genre ==

The Autobiography is a spiritual conversion narrative that outlines Malcolm X's philosophy of black pride, black nationalism, and pan-Africanism. Literary critic Arnold Rampersad and Malcolm X biographer Michael Eric Dyson agree that the narrative of the Autobiography resembles the Augustinian approach to confessional narrative. Augustine's Confessions and The Autobiography of Malcolm X both relate the early hedonistic lives of their subjects, document deep philosophical change for spiritual reasons, and describe later disillusionment with religious groups their subjects had once revered. Haley and autobiographical scholar Albert E. Stone compare the narrative to the Icarus myth. Author Paul John Eakin and writer Alex Gillespie suggest that part of the Autobiographys rhetorical power comes from "the vision of a man whose swiftly unfolding career had outstripped the possibilities of the traditional autobiography he had meant to write", thus destroying "the illusion of the finished and unified personality". In addition to functioning as a spiritual conversion narrative, The Autobiography of Malcolm X also reflects generic elements from other distinctly American literary forms, from the Puritan conversion narrative of Jonathan Edwards and the secular self-analyses of Benjamin Franklin, to the African American slave narratives. This aesthetic decision on the part of Malcolm X and Haley also has profound implications for the thematic content of the work, as the progressive movement between forms that is evidenced in the text reflects the personal progression of its subject. Considering this, the editors of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature assert that, "Malcolm's Autobiography takes pains to interrogate the very models through which his persona achieves gradual self-understanding...his story's inner logic defines his life as a quest for an authentic mode of being, a quest that demands a constant openness to new ideas requiring fresh kinds of expression." == Construction ==

Haley coauthored The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and also performed the basic functions of a ghostwriter and biographical amanuensis, writing, compiling, and editing the Autobiography based on more than 50 in-depth interviews he conducted with Malcolm X between 1963 and his subject's 1965 assassination. The two first met in 1959, when Haley wrote an article about the Nation of Islam for ''Reader's Digest, and again when Haley interviewed Malcolm X for Playboy'' in 1962. In 1963 the Doubleday publishing company asked Haley to write a book about the life of Malcolm X. American writer and literary critic Harold Bloom writes, "When Haley approached Malcolm with the idea, Malcolm gave him a startled look ..." After Malcolm X was granted permission from Elijah Muhammad, he and Haley commenced work on the Autobiography, a process which began as two-and three-hour interview sessions at Haley's studio in Greenwich Village. I said, "Mr.Malcolm, could you tell me something about your mother?" And I will never, ever forget how he stopped almost as if he was suspended like a marionette. And he said, "I remember the kind of dresses she used to wear. They were old and faded and gray." And then he walked some more. And he said, "I remember how she was always bent over the stove, trying to stretch what little we had." And that was the beginning, that night, of his walk. And he walked that floor until just about daybreak. Though Haley is ostensibly a ghostwriter on the Autobiography, modern scholars tend to treat him as an essential and core collaborator who acted as an invisible figure in the composition of the work. He minimized his own voice, and signed a contract to limit his authorial discretion in favor of producing what looked like verbatim copy. Manning Marable considers the view of Haley as simply a ghostwriter as a deliberate narrative construction of black scholars of the day who wanted to see the book as a singular creation of a dynamic leader and martyr. Marable argues that a critical analysis of the Autobiography, or the full relationship between Malcolm X and Haley, does not support this view; he describes it instead as a collaboration. Haley's contribution to the work is notable, and several scholars discuss how it should be characterized. In a view shared by Eakin, Stone and Dyson, psychobiographical writer Eugene Victor Wolfenstein writes that Haley performed the duties of a quasi-psychoanalytic Freudian psychiatrist and spiritual confessor. Gillespie suggests, and Wolfenstein agrees, that the act of self-narration was itself a transformative process that spurred significant introspection and personal change in the life of its subject. Haley exercised discretion over content, guided Malcolm X in critical stylistic and rhetorical choices, and compiled the work. In the epilogue to the Autobiography, Haley describes an agreement he made with Malcolm X, who demanded that: "Nothing can be in this book's manuscript that I didn't say and nothing can be left out that I want in it." As such, Haley wrote an addendum to the contract specifically referring to the book as an "as told to" account. Narrative presentation In "Malcolm X: The Art of Autobiography", writer and professor John Edgar Wideman examines in detail the narrative landscapes found in biography. Wideman suggests that as a writer, Haley was attempting to satisfy "multiple allegiances": to his subject, to his publisher, to his "editor's agenda", and to himself. Haley was an important contributor to the Autobiographys popular appeal, writes Wideman. Wideman expounds upon the "inevitable compromise" of biographers, Wideman details some of the specific pitfalls Haley encountered while coauthoring the Autobiography: You are serving many masters, and inevitably you are compromised. The man speaks and you listen but you do not take notes, the first compromise and perhaps betrayal. You may attempt through various stylistic conventions and devices to reconstitute for the reader your experience of hearing face to face the man's words. The sound of the man's narration may be represented by vocabulary, syntax, imagery, graphic devices of various sorts—quotation marks, punctuation, line breaks, visual patterning of white space and black space, markers that encode print analogs to speech—vernacular interjections, parentheses, ellipses, asterisks, footnotes, italics, dashes .... In "Two Create One: The Act of Collaboration in Recent Black Autobiography: Ossie Guffy, Nate Shaw, and Malcolm X", Stone argues that Haley played an "essential role" in "recovering the historical identity" of Malcolm X. Stone also reminds the reader that collaboration is a cooperative endeavor, requiring more than Haley's prose alone can provide, "convincing and coherent" as it may be: Though a writer's skill and imagination have combined words and voice into a more or less convincing and coherent narrative, the actual writer [Haley] has no large fund of memories to draw upon: the subject's [Malcolm X] memory and imagination are the original sources of the arranged story and have also come into play critically as the text takes final shape. Thus where material comes from, and what has been done to it are separable and of equal significance in collaborations. In Stone's estimation, supported by Wideman, the source of autobiographical material and the efforts made to shape them into a workable narrative are distinct, and of equal value in a critical assessment of the collaboration that produced the Autobiography. While Haley's skills as writer have significant influence on the narrative's shape, Stone writes, they require a "subject possessed of a powerful memory and imagination" to produce a workable narrative. While Haley ultimately deferred to Malcolm X's specific choice of words when composing the manuscript, caused by Malcolm X's rift with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, "overturned the design" In the Autobiographys epilogue, Haley describes the incident: I sent Malcolm X some rough chapters to read. I was appalled when they were soon returned, red-inked in many places where he had told of his almost father-and-son relationship with Elijah Muhammad. Telephoning Malcolm X, I reminded him of his previous decisions, and I stressed that if those chapters contained such telegraphing to readers of what was to lie ahead, then the book would automatically be robbed of some of its building suspense and drama. Malcolm X said, gruffly, 'Whose book is this?' I told him 'yours, of course,' and that I only made the objection in my position as a writer. But late that night Malcolm X telephoned. 'I'm sorry. You're right. I was upset about something. Forget what I wanted changed, let what you already had stand.' I never again gave him chapters to review unless I was with him. Several times I would covertly watch him frown and wince as he read, but he never again asked for any change in what he had originally said. In the words of Eakin, "Because this complex vision of his existence is clearly not that of the early sections of the Autobiography, Alex Haley and Malcolm X were forced to confront the consequences of this discontinuity in perspective for the narrative, already a year old." Malcolm X, after giving the matter some thought, later accepted Haley's suggestion. While Marable argues that Malcolm X was his own best revisionist, he also points out that Haley's collaborative role in shaping the Autobiography was notable. Haley influenced the narrative's direction and tone while remaining faithful to his subject's syntax and diction. Marable writes that Haley worked "hundreds of sentences into paragraphs", and organized them into "subject areas". . This was the only time the two men ever met and their meeting lasted only one minute. Andrews suggests that Haley's role expanded because the book's subject became less available to micro-manage the manuscript, and "Malcolm had eventually resigned himself" to allowing "Haley's ideas about effective storytelling" to shape the narrative. Although Malcolm X retained final approval of their hybrid text, he was not privy to the actual editorial processes superimposed from Haley's side. The Library of Congress held the answers. This collection includes the papers of Doubleday's then-executive editor, Kenneth McCormick, who had worked closely with Haley for several years as the Autobiography had been constructed. As in the Romaine papers, I found more evidence of Haley's sometimes-weekly private commentary with McCormick about the laborious process of composing the book. They also revealed how several attorneys retained by Doubleday closely monitored and vetted entire sections of the controversial text in 1964, demanding numerous name changes, the reworking and deletion of blocks of paragraphs, and so forth. In late 1963, Haley was particularly worried about what he viewed as Malcolm X's anti-Semitism. He therefore rewrote material to eliminate a number of negative statements about Jews in the book manuscript, with the explicit covert goal of 'getting them past Malcolm X,' without his coauthor's knowledge or consent. Thus, the censorship of Malcolm X had begun well prior to his assassination. Further, because much of the available biographical studies of Malcolm X have been written by white authors, Dyson suggests their ability to "interpret black experience" is suspect. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Dyson says, reflects both Malcolm X's goal of narrating his life story for public consumption and Haley's political ideologies. Dyson writes, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X ... has been criticized for avoiding or distorting certain facts. Indeed, the autobiography is as much a testament to Haley's ingenuity in shaping the manuscript as it is a record of Malcolm's attempt to tell his story." Rampersad suggests that Haley understood autobiographies as "almost fiction". In "The Color of His Eyes: Bruce Perry's Malcolm and Malcolm's Malcolm", Rampersad criticizes Perry's biography, Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America, and makes the general point that the writing of the Autobiography is part of the narrative of blackness in the 20th century and consequently should "not be held utterly beyond inquiry". To Rampersad, the Autobiography is about psychology, ideology, a conversion narrative, and the myth-making process. "Malcolm inscribed in it the terms of his understanding of the form even as the unstable, even treacherous form concealed and distorted particular aspects of his quest. But there is no Malcolm untouched by doubt or fiction. Malcolm's Malcolm is in itself a fabrication; the 'truth' about him is impossible to know." Rampersad suggests that since his 1965 assassination, Malcolm X has "become the desires of his admirers, who have reshaped memory, historical record and the autobiography according to their wishes, which is to say, according to their needs as they perceive them." Further, Rampersad says, many admirers of Malcolm X perceive "accomplished and admirable" figures like Martin Luther King Jr., and W. E. B. Du Bois inadequate to fully express black humanity as it struggles with oppression, "while Malcolm is seen as the apotheosis of black individual greatness ... he is a perfect hero—his wisdom is surpassing, his courage definitive, his sacrifice messianic". Rampersad suggests that devotees have helped shape the myth of Malcolm X. Author Joe Wood writes: [T]he autobiography iconizes Malcolm twice, not once. Its second Malcolm—the El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz finale—is a mask with no distinct ideology, it is not particularly Islamic, not particularly nationalist, not particularly humanist. Like any well crafted icon or story, the mask is evidence of its subject's humanity, of Malcolm's strong human spirit. But both masks hide as much character as they show. The first mask served a nationalism Malcolm had rejected before the book was finished; the second is mostly empty and available. To Eakin, a significant portion of the Autobiography involves Haley and Malcolm X shaping the fiction of the completed self. Stone writes that Haley's description of the Autobiographys composition makes clear that this fiction is "especially misleading in the case of Malcolm X"; both Haley and the Autobiography itself are "out of phase" with its subject's "life and identity". Dyson writes, "Louis Lomax|[Louis] Lomax says that Malcolm became a 'lukewarm integrationist'. [Peter] Goldman suggests that Malcolm was 'improvising', that he embraced and discarded ideological options as he went along. Albert Cleage|[Albert] Cleage and [Oba] T'Shaka hold that he remained a revolutionary black nationalist. And James Hal Cone|[James Hal] Cone asserts that he became an internationalist with a humanist bent." Marable writes that Malcolm X was a "committed internationalist" and "black nationalist" at the end of his life, not an "integrationist", noting, "what I find in my own research is greater continuity than discontinuity". Marable, in "Rediscovering Malcolm's Life: A Historian's Adventures in Living History", critically analyzes the collaboration that produced the Autobiography. Marable argues autobiographical "memoirs" are "inherently biased", representing the subject as he would appear with certain facts privileged, others deliberately omitted. Autobiographical narratives self-censor, reorder event chronology, and alter names. According to Marable, "nearly everyone writing about Malcolm X" has failed to critically and objectively analyze and research the subject properly. Marable suggests that most historians have assumed that the Autobiography is veritable truth, devoid of any ideological influence or stylistic embellishment by Malcolm X or Haley. Further, Marable believes the "most talented revisionist of Malcolm X, was Malcolm X", who actively fashioned and reinvented his public image and verbiage so as to increase favor with diverse groups of people in various situations. Haley writes that during the last months of Malcolm X's life "uncertainty and confusion" about his views were widespread in Harlem, his base of operations. and, Dyson writes, was "experiencing a radical shift" in his core "personal and political understandings". == Legacy and influence ==

Eliot Fremont-Smith, reviewing The Autobiography of Malcolm X for The New York Times in 1965, described it as "extraordinary" and said it is a "brilliant, painful, important book". Two years later, historian John William Ward wrote that the book "will surely become one of the classics in American autobiography". Bayard Rustin argued the book suffered from a lack of critical analysis, which he attributed to Malcolm X's expectation that Haley be a "chronicler, not an interpreter." Newsweek also highlighted the limited insight and criticism in The Autobiography but praised it for power and poignance. However, Truman Nelson in The Nation lauded the epilogue as revelatory and described Haley as a "skillful amanuensis". Variety called it a "mesmerizing page-turner" in 1992, and in 1998, Time named The Autobiography of Malcolm X one of ten "required reading" nonfiction books. The Autobiography of Malcolm X has influenced generations of readers. In 1990, Charles Solomon writes in the Los Angeles Times, "Unlike many '60s icons, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with its double message of anger and love, remains an inspiring document." Cultural historian Howard Bruce Franklin describes it as "one of the most influential books in late-twentieth-century American culture", and the Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature credits Haley with shaping "what has undoubtedly become the most influential twentieth-century African American autobiography". Considering the literary impact of Malcolm X's Autobiography, we may note the tremendous influence of the book, as well as its subject generally, on the development of the Black Arts Movement. Indeed, it was the day after Malcolm's assassination that the poet and playwright, Amiri Baraka, established the Black Arts Repertory Theater, which would serve to catalyze the aesthetic progression of the movement. Writers and thinkers associated with the Black Arts movement found in the Autobiography an aesthetic embodiment of his profoundly influential qualities, namely, "the vibrancy of his public voice, the clarity of his analyses of oppression's hidden history and inner logic, the fearlessness of his opposition to white supremacy, and the unconstrained ardor of his advocacy for revolution 'by any means necessary.'" bell hooks writes "When I was a young college student in the early seventies, the book I read which revolutionized my thinking about race and politics was The Autobiography of Malcolm X." David Bradley adds: She [hooks] is not alone. Ask any middle-aged socially conscious intellectual to list the books that influenced his or her youthful thinking, and he or she will most likely mention The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Some will do more than mention it. Some will say that ... they picked it up—by accident, or maybe by assignment, or because a friend pressed it on them—and that they approached the reading of it without great expectations, but somehow that book ... took hold of them. Got inside them. Altered their vision, their outlook, their insight. Changed their lives. Max Elbaum concurs, writing that "The Autobiography of Malcolm X was without question the single most widely read and influential book among young people of all racial backgrounds who went to their first demonstration sometime between 1965 and 1968." At the end of his tenure as the first African-American U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder selected The Autobiography of Malcolm X when asked what book he would recommend to a young person coming to Washington, D.C. Publication and sales White House Doubleday had contracted to publish The Autobiography of Malcolm X and paid a $30,000 advance to Malcolm X and Haley in 1963. Since then The Autobiography of Malcolm X has sold millions of copies, Marable described Doubleday's choice as the "most disastrous decision in corporate publishing history". According to The New York Times, the paperback edition sold 400,000 copies in 1967 and 800,000 copies the following year. The Autobiography entered its 18th printing by 1970. The New York Times reported that six million copies of the book had been sold by 1977. Between 1989 and 1992, sales of the book increased by 300%. In 2020, Laurence Fishburne narrated it in what was Audible's first-ever unabridged audiobook recording. Screenplay adaptations In 1968 film producer Marvin Worth hired novelist James Baldwin to write a screenplay based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Baldwin was joined by screenwriter Arnold Perl, who died in 1971 before the screenplay could be finished. Baldwin developed his work on the screenplay into the book ''One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley's "The Autobiography of Malcolm X", published in 1972. Other authors who attempted to draft screenplays include playwright David Mamet, novelist David Bradley, author Charles Fuller, and screenwriter Calder Willingham. Director Spike Lee revised the Baldwin-Perl script for his 1992 film Malcolm X''. In a 1964 letter to his publisher, Haley had described these chapters as, "the most material of the book, some of it rather lava-like". In July 2018, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture acquired one of the "missing chapters", "The Negro", at auction for $7,000. Editions The book has been published in more than 45 editions and in many languages, including Arabic, German, French, and Indonesian. Important editions include: • • • • • • ==See also==