Jonathan Eig
Eig in 2019
Eig in 2019
Born (1964-04-26) April 26, 1964
Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Occupation
  • Journalist
  • biographer
Alma materNorthwestern University
Subjects
  • American history
  • sports
SpouseJennifer Tescher
Children3

Jonathan Eig (US: /ˈaɪɡ/; born April 26, 1964) is an American journalist and biographer. He is the author of six books, the most recent being King: A Life (2023), a biography of Martin Luther King Jr.[1]

Biography

Eig was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Monsey, New York. He is Jewish.[2] His father was an accountant and his mother was a stay-at-home mom and community activist. Eig began working for his hometown newspaper when he was 16. He attended Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, graduating in 1986 with a bachelor's degree. After college he worked as a news reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Dallas Morning News, Chicago magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. Eig has taught writing at Columbia College Chicago and lectures at Northwestern. He has written as a freelancer for many outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, and online edition of The New Yorker. He is married to Jennifer Tescher and has three children. He lives in Chicago.

Eig appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in May 2010.[3] He has appeared in two PBS documentaries—Prohibition and Jackie Robinson—made by Ken Burns and Florentine Films. He is currently working with Burns as a consulting producer on a documentary about Muhammad Ali.[4]

In 2016, Eig appeared on AMC's The Making of the Mob: Chicago, talking about Al Capone.

Reception

In 2019 Men's Health magazine named Eig's book Ali: A Life the 23rd best sports book of all time.[5] In 2020, Esquire magazine called Ali one of the 35 best sports books ever written.[6] Esquire also called Eig's book Luckiest Man one of the 100 best baseball books of all time.[7]

Eig's first book was Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig (2005). Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season was his second book. For his third book, Get Capone, Eig discovered thousands of pages of never-before-reported government documents on the government's case against Capone. The Birth of the Pill (2014), Eig's fourth book, told the story of the renegades who invented the first oral contraceptive.

In a 2017 review of Ali: A Life, Joyce Carol Oates, writing for The New York Times, said: "This richly researched, sympathetic yet unsparing portrait of a controversial figure for whom the personal and the political dramatically fused could not come at a more appropriate time in our beleaguered American history…. As Muhammad Ali's life was an epic of a life so Ali: A Life is an epic of a biography. Much in its pages will be familiar to those with some knowledge of boxing but even the familiar may be glimpsed from a new perspective in Eig's fluent prose; for pages in succession its narrative reads like a novel — a suspenseful novel with a cast of vivid characters who prevail through decades and who help to define the singular individual who was both a brilliantly innovative, incomparably charismatic heavyweight boxer and a public figure whose iconic significance shifted radically through the decades as in an unlikely fairy tale in which the most despised athlete in American history becomes, by the 21st century, the most beloved athlete in American history."[8]

In 2023 Eig published a biography of Martin Luther King Jr., King: A Life. Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Dwight Garner stated that it "supplants David J. Garrow's 1986 biography Bearing the Cross as the definitive life of King".[1]

Published works

  • Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig (2005)
  • Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season (2007)
  • Get Capone: The Secret Plot that Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster (2010)
  • The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (2014)
  • Ali: A Life (2017)
  • King: A Life (2023)

Awards

References

  1. 1 2 Garner, Dwight (May 8, 2023). "The New Definitive Biography of Martin Luther King Jr". The New York Times. Retrieved May 19, 2023.
  2. ↑ After 'Ali,' Jonathan Eig Tackles An Even Bigger Subject: Martin Luther King, Jr. Shia Kapos, Chicago (March 7, 2018)
  3. ↑ "Al Capone Wasn't Brought Down By Eliot Ness, It Was The IRS: Author Jonathan Eig On Jon Stewart (VIDEO)". Huffington Post. July 4, 2010. Retrieved December 8, 2017.
  4. ↑ Kogan, Rick. "Jonathan Eig's 'Ali' book may become a documentary by Ken Burns". chicagotribune.com. Retrieved December 8, 2017.
  5. ↑ Romano, Evan; Lutz, Eric (June 1, 2020). "33 Sports Books to Read Now That Sports Are (Mostly) Back". Esquire. Retrieved March 2, 2022.
  6. ↑ Wilson, Paul; Hersey, Will (January 11, 2022). "The 33 Best Sports Books Ever Written". Esquire. Retrieved March 2, 2022.
  7. ↑ Belth, Alex (November 30, 2021). "The 100 Best Baseball Books Ever Written". Esquire. Retrieved March 2, 2022.
  8. ↑ Oates, Joyce Carol (November 28, 2017). "Muhammad Ali, Beginning to End for the First Time in a Book". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved December 8, 2017.
  9. ↑ "CASEY Award". Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine. Archived from the original on March 3, 2016. Retrieved March 24, 2010.
  10. ↑ Manning, Kate (October 17, 2014). "Book review: The Birth of the Pill, and the reinvention of sex, by Jonathan Eig". Washington Post. Retrieved March 2, 2022.
  11. ↑ "NAACP | Nominees Announced for 49th NAACP Image Awards". NAACP. November 20, 2017. Archived from the original on March 8, 2021. Retrieved December 8, 2017.
  12. ↑ "2017 William Hill Shortlist Announced". Foyles. Retrieved December 8, 2017.
  13. ↑ "BIO Announces Finalists for the 2018 Plutarch Award". Biographers International. Retrieved March 2, 2022.
  14. ↑ John Maher (February 21, 2018). "Long Soldier, Zhang, Le Guin Win At 2018 PEN Literary Awards". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved February 21, 2018.
  15. ↑ "The 2018 PEN America Literary Awards Winners". PEN America. February 20, 2018. Retrieved February 21, 2018.
  16. ↑ Porter Anderson (January 31, 2018). "Industry Notes: PEN America's Finalists". Publishing Perspectives. Retrieved February 21, 2018.
  17. ↑ The Times (June 8, 2018). "Jonathan Eig's Ali: A Life wins Times Biography of the Year". The Times. Retrieved March 2, 2022.
  18. ↑ "History | Previous Winners". Telegraph Sports Book Award. Retrieved March 2, 2022.
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