Wikipedia:Today's featured article/February 21, 2014

The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) was the result of a collaboration between the African-American Muslim minister and human rights activist Malcolm X and the journalist Alex Haley. Haley based it on a series of interviews between 1963 and Malcolm X's assassination on February 21, 1965. It is a spiritual conversion narrative outlining Malcolm X's philosophy of black pride, black nationalism, and pan-Africanism. While Malcolm X and scholars contemporary to the book's publication regarded Haley as the book's ghostwriter, modern scholars regard him as an essential collaborator who subsumed his authorial voice to allow readers to feel as though Malcolm X were speaking directly to them. Haley also influenced some of Malcolm X's literary choices and Haley's proactive censorship of antisemitic material significantly influenced the ideological tone of the Autobiography, increasing its popularity although distorting Malcolm X's public persona. A New York Times reviewer described it as a "brilliant, painful, important book" and Time named it in 1998 as one of ten "required reading" nonfiction books. A screenplay adaptation provided the source material for Spike Lee's 1992 film Malcolm X. (Full article...)

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