by Malcolm X
Malcolm X told his life to Alex Haley across two years of interviews and was murdered before the book appeared. It is the source James Baldwin was hired to turn into a film.
Malcolm X's life in his own telling: the Nebraska childhood and his father's death, the Harlem hustling years, the prison conversion, the rise through the Nation of Islam, and the break that ended with his assassination in February 1965. The journalist Alex Haley took it down in more than fifty interviews between 1963 and 1965 and finished the book after Malcolm X was killed. Grove Press published it in October 1965, nine months after his death.
The arrangement was unusual and the title page states it: the book is by Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley. The two met when Haley wrote about the Nation of Islam for Reader's Digest, and the interviews began in 1963 under contract to Doubleday. Malcolm X revised chapters as his own position changed — by the final sessions he had left the Nation, made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and taken the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.
He did not live to read the finished book. After the assassination Doubleday dropped it, Grove Press picked it up, and Haley added an epilogue describing the collaboration and its final months. Later editions carry Ossie Davis's eulogy.
The book matters twice over. It is the standard account of a life that runs through James Baldwin's late nonfiction, and it is the text Columbia Pictures hired Baldwin to adapt in 1968 — the commission that became One Day When I Was Lost.
Malcolm's account of copying the dictionary makes education a physical practice: writing, speaking the copied words aloud, then testing what he remembers. The slow beginning matters because the narrator is already known for his command of an audience. He takes that fluency apart into work that once felt uncertain and awkward. The passage also begins with a wish to write better letters, so learning is not merely private self-improvement. It answers a need to reach other people, even while the prison restricts his movement.
In the Mecca letter, repeated acts of eating, drinking, resting and praying make shared belief something experienced through the body. Malcolm describes these encounters as evidence that requires him to revise earlier conclusions. He also anticipates the reader's surprise and explains why reconsideration need not mean abandoning conviction. The passage presents openness to new experience as a consistent principle within a changing life. Its force lies in that argument for revision, not in treating one journey as proof that racial injustice has disappeared.
My alma mater was books, a good library.
Nearly everything later written or filmed about Malcolm X — Baldwin's screenplay included — starts from this book.
Haley held the pen, but the talk is Malcolm X's: courtroom-precise about names, dates, and grievances, and unsparing about his own hustling years.
The last chapters were dictated by a man who says plainly that he expects to be killed. The epilogue then records that he was.
Depicts
The book's central relationship after the conversion: the leader Malcolm X corresponded with from prison, served for twelve years, and broke with in 1964. The later chapters record the silencing, the paternity revelations, and the threats that followed him out of the Nation of Islam.
Depicts
His own life, told to Alex Haley across more than fifty interviews between 1963 and 1965: Malcolm Little of Omaha and Lansing, Detroit Red of Harlem, the prison conversion, the ministry, the break with the Nation of Islam, and the pilgrimage to Mecca. He read and corrected chapters as they were drafted but did not live to see the book published.
Depicts
Haley enters his own book in the epilogue — his first-person account of the two-year collaboration, written after the assassination: how the interviews were won, how the chapters were corrected, and how the story ended at the Audubon Ballroom.
1959
Alex Haley writes about the Nation of Islam for Reader's Digest and meets Malcolm X.
1963
The interviews begin under contract to Doubleday — more than fifty sessions over two years.
1964
Mid-project, Malcolm X leaves the Nation of Islam and makes the pilgrimage to Mecca. The book's later chapters absorb the change.
1965
Malcolm X is assassinated on 21 February. Doubleday drops the book; Grove Press publishes it on 29 October with Haley's epilogue.
1992
Spike Lee's film Malcolm X, built in part on the Baldwin and Perl screenplay drawn from this book, returns it to the bestseller lists.
Baldwin's screenplay adaptation of this book, published after Columbia shelved the film.
Read our take
Baldwin's first-hand report from inside the Nation of Islam years, including his evening with Elijah Muhammad.
Read our take
Baldwin's memoir of the decade in which Malcolm X's murder is one of the three that shape the book.
Read our takeMalcolm X told it; the journalist Alex Haley wrote it down and shaped it. The title page credits it to Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley, and the collaboration ran through more than fifty interviews between 1963 and 1965. Malcolm X reviewed the chapters himself.
Grove Press published it on 29 October 1965, nine months after Malcolm X was assassinated. Doubleday had commissioned the book but dropped it after the murder.
The final chapters, dictated after the break with the Nation of Islam and the pilgrimage to Mecca, record Malcolm X saying he does not expect to live to see the book in print. Alex Haley's epilogue, written afterward, describes the assassination and the collaboration that produced the text.
Columbia Pictures hired James Baldwin in 1968 to adapt this book for film. The studio's revisions drove him off the project, no film was made from his script in his lifetime, and he published his version as One Day When I Was Lost in 1972.
It is the primary account of Malcolm X's life and the starting point for later biographies, which have tested it. Historians have documented places where the telling compresses or heightens events, particularly in the hustling years, and material cut from the manuscript exists — an unpublished chapter surfaced at auction in 2018 and was acquired by the Schomburg Center in Harlem.
Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.
The doctor of the Paris slums who wrote the century's blackest, funniest novel — and changed the sound of French prose.
View author
American abolitionist — a campaigner for the abolition of slavery — orator and newspaper publisher, born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, who escaped north in 1838 and spent the next half-century arguing for Black citizenship in books, newspapers and federal office. In 1859 the American minister in London, the senior United States diplomat in Britain, refused him a passport for France on the ground that he was not a citizen of the country he had been born in: American law at the time held that no Black person could be one. The French minister in London issued him a permit to enter France at once. Twenty-seven years later he reached Paris anyway, aged sixty-eight, and spent weeks in its galleries.
View author
The Brooklyn dropout who arrived in Paris broke at thirty-eight and wrote the exuberant, banned books that ended American censorship.
View authorThe sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document The Autobiography of Malcolm X, its publication, and its place in literary history.
Primary excerpt for the first section.
Primary excerpt for the second section.
Primary text included as part of the documented record for The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
First-person evidence and historical context used in preparing the The Autobiography of Malcolm X page.
The Schomburg Center finding aid supplies independent archival context for Malcolm X’s papers, drafts, and public work.
The contemporary collection of speeches was used to cross-check Malcolm X’s public voice, chronology, and political development.
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
Explore more resources