A master storyteller (Ken Burns), New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first full biography of the civil rights icon in decades, mixing revelatory and exhaustive research with a brisk and accessible narrative to forge the definitive portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., the preacher and activist who shook the world.

Drawing on large amounts of previously unavailable material, including the papers of King’s personal archivist, and audio recordings made by his father and wife, Jonathan Eig gives us an intimate view of the man and his accomplishments. He casts fresh light on the King family’s Georgia sharecropper origins, and on the young Martin Luther King’s complex relationship with his father, and with his own sometimes despairing moods.

As we follow King from the classroom to the pulpit and into the streets, Eig recreates the day to day pressures and choices King confronted, and the often brilliant successes he and his close collaborators achieved against long odds. Charting King’s turbulent inner life and times empathetically, Eig explores the famous marches in Selma and Washington, the FBI’s harassment campaign, the backroom arguments that made the movement, and the personal toll it all took.

Praised by Black freedom struggle scholar Peniel E. Joseph as a resounding triumph that offers a stirringly contemporary and complex portrait of a fully human and humane King, Eig gives us an MLK for our times–a deep thinker, brilliant strategist, and complicated man who made demands, not wishes, and used peaceful protest as a lever to force those in power to give up the privileges they hoarded.

Includes black-and-white photographs