The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Summary

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 Autobiography's 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 Autobiography's 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 ..." Haley recalls, "It was one of the few times I have ever seen him uncertain." 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. Bloom writes, "Malcolm was critical of Haley's middle-class status, as well as his Christian beliefs and twenty years of service in the U.S. Military."

When work on the Autobiography began in early 1963, Haley grew frustrated with Malcolm X's tendency to speak only about Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. Haley reminded him that the book was supposed to be about Malcolm X, not Muhammad or the Nation of Islam, a comment which angered Malcolm X. Haley eventually shifted the focus of the interviews toward the life of his subject when he asked Malcolm X about his mother:

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.

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 Autobiography's popular appeal, writes Wideman. Wideman expounds upon the "inevitable compromise" of biographers, and argues that in order to allow readers to insert themselves into the broader socio-psychological narrative, neither coauthor's voice is as strong as it could have been. 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 the body of the Autobiography, Wideman writes, Haley's authorial agency is seemingly absent: "Haley does so much with so little fuss ... an approach that appears so rudimentary in fact conceals sophisticated choices, quiet mastery of a medium". Wideman argues that Haley wrote the body of the Autobiography in a manner of Malcolm X's choosing and the epilogue as an extension of the biography itself, his subject having given him carte blanche for the chapter. Haley's voice in the body of the book is a tactic, Wideman writes, producing a text nominally written by Malcolm X but seemingly written by no author. The subsumption of Haley's own voice in the narrative allows the reader to feel as though the voice of Malcolm X is speaking directly and continuously, a stylistic tactic that, in Wideman's view, was a matter of Haley's authorial choice: "Haley grants Malcolm the tyrannical authority of an author, a disembodied speaker whose implied presence blends into the reader's imagining of the tale being told."

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:

Collaboration between Malcolm X and Haley

The collaboration between Malcolm X and Haley took on many dimensions; editing, revising and composing the Autobiography was a power struggle between two men with sometimes competing ideas of the final shape for the book. Haley "took pains to show how Malcolm dominated their relationship and tried to control the composition of the book", writes Rampersad. Rampersad also writes that Haley was aware that memory is selective and that autobiographies are "almost by definition projects in fiction", and that it was his responsibility as biographer to select material based on his authorial discretion. The narrative shape crafted by Haley and Malcolm X is the result of a life account "distorted and diminished" by the "process of selection", Rampersad suggests, yet the narrative's shape may in actuality be more revealing than the narrative itself. In the epilogue Haley describes the process used to edit the manuscript, giving specific examples of how Malcolm X controlled the language.

While Haley ultimately deferred to Malcolm X's specific choice of words when composing the manuscript, Wideman writes, "the nature of writing biography or autobiography ... means that Haley's promise to Malcolm, his intent to be a 'dispassionate chronicler', is a matter of disguising, not removing, his authorial presence." Haley played an important role in persuading Malcolm X not to re-edit the book as a polemic against Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam at a time when Haley already had most of the material needed to complete the book, and asserted his authorial agency when the Autobiography's "fractured construction", caused by Malcolm X's rift with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, "overturned the design" of the manuscript and created a narrative crisis. In the Autobiography's 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.

Myth-making

In Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X, Dyson criticizes historians and biographers of the time for re-purposing the Autobiography as a transcendent narrative by a "mythological" Malcolm X without being critical enough of the underlying ideas. 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.

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".

The impact of the book is seen as notably influential on the development of the Black Arts Movement. The day after Malcolm X's death, Amiri Baraka established the Black Arts Repertory Theater, which catalyzed 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.'"

Regarding the book, author bell hooks wrote "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:

Publication and sales

Doubleday had contracted to publish The Autobiography of Malcolm X and paid a $30,000 advance to Malcolm X and Haley in 1963. In March 1965, three weeks after Malcolm X's assassination, Nelson Doubleday Jr., canceled its contract out of fear for the safety of his employees. Grove Press then published the book later that year. 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".

The Autobiography of Malcolm X has sold well since its 1965 publication. 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. The book experienced increased readership and returned to the best-seller list in the 1990s, helped in part by the publicity surrounding Spike Lee's 1992 film Malcolm X. 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.

Missing chapters

In 1992, attorney Gregory Reed bought the original manuscripts of The Autobiography of Malcolm X for $100,000 at the sale of the Haley Estate. The manuscripts included three "missing chapters", titled "The Negro", "The End of Christianity", and "Twenty Million Black Muslims", that were omitted from the original text. In a 1964 letter to his publisher, Haley had described these chapters as, "the most impact [sic] material of the book, some of it rather lava-like". Marable writes that the missing chapters were "dictated and written" during Malcolm X's final months in the Nation of Islam. In them, Marable says, Malcolm X proposed the establishment of a union of African American civic and political organizations. Marable wonders whether this project might have led some within the Nation of Islam and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to try to silence Malcolm X.

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: