NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | Winner of the 2018 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing | Winner of The Times Sports Biography of the Year | The definitive biography of an American icon, from a best-selling author with unique access to Alis inner circle.

As Muhammad Alis life was an epic of a life soAli: A Lifeis an epic of a biography . . . for pages in succession its narrative reads like a novela suspenseful novel with a cast of vivid characters. Joyce Carol Oates,New York Times Book Review

Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Clay in racially segregated Louisville, Kentucky, the son of a sign painter and a housekeeper. He went on to become a heavyweight boxer with a dazzling mix of power and speed, a warrior for racial pride, a comedian, a preacher, a poet, a draft resister, an actor, and a lover. Millions hated him when he changed his religion, changed his name, and refused to fight in the Vietnam War. He fought his way back, winning hearts, but at great cost.

Jonathan Eig, hailed by Ken Burns as one of Americas master storytellers, sheds important new light on Alis politics, religion, personal life, and neurological condition through unprecedented access to all the key people in Alis life, more than 500 interviews and thousands of pages of previously unreleased FBI and Justice Department files and audiotaped interviews from the 1960s.Ali: A Lifeis a story about America, about race, about a brutal sport, and about a courageous man who shook up the world.