Jonathan Eig to be Awarded New-York Historical Society’s 2024 Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History for King: A Life

Prize Includes $50,000 and Title of American Historian Laureate

Dr. Agnes Hsu-Tang, chair of the New-York Historical Society’s Board of Trustees, and Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of New-York Historical, announced today that Jonathan Eig will be honored with New-York Historical’s annual Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History for King: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). The award recognizes the best book of the year in the field of American history or biography. Jonathan Eig will receive a $50,000 cash award, an engraved medal, and the title of American Historian Laureate. This honor will be presented at New-York Historical’s annual Chair’s Council Weekend with History on April 5, where Eig will be interviewed by New-York Historical Board of Trustee member and Harvard University Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad. 

“Jonathan Eig’s deft, multi-dimensional portrayal of Martin Luther King Jr.’s progression from a civil rights activist to becoming ‘one of America’s founding fathers’ (“Epilogue”) in King: A Life reminds us the continued shaping of America and that—even as the world’s first constitutional democracy—America and its many founders can be both heroic and imperfect,” said Dr. Agnes Hsu-Tang, chair of New-York Historical’s Board of Trustees.  “As one of the nation’s first historical institutions founded in 1804 to preserve evidence of American history, New-York Historical Society proudly bestows our 2023 Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History to Jonathan Eig for his magnificent work, King: A Life.” 

“I am honored to receive this award, and especially honored to join the distinguished company of previous recipients of the Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize,” said Jonathan Eig. “I’ve spent many happy hours as a visitor and researcher at the New-York Historical Society, and I have a great appreciation and respect for the institution. Their work—and mine, too, I hope—helps us see that history is not something to be fought or feared but something to be studied, read, and enjoyed.”

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.―and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. Eig casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father―as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.

Jonathan Eig is the bestselling author of six books, four of them New York Times bestsellers. His most recent book, King: A Life, has been hailed as a “monumental” and “definitive” biography of Martin Luther King Jr. It was longlisted for the National Book Award and named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, Washington Post, and Time magazine. His previous book, Ali: A Life, won a 2018 PEN America Literary Award. Eig is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School. He served as a producer on the PBS documentary Muhammad Ali, which was directed by Ken Burns. He lives in Chicago with his wife and children.

King: A Life was selected by a prize committee comprising historians and New-York Historical leadership from a field of more than 122 submissions. Previous winners of the Book Prize in American History include Beverly Gage for G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, Alan Taylor for American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850; Tracy Campbell for The Year of Peril: America in 1942; Rick Atkinson for The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777; Benn Steil for The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War; John A. Farrell for Richard Nixon: The Life; Jane Kamensky for Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley; Eric Foner for Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad; Jill Lepore for The Secret History of Wonder Woman; Doris Kearns Goodwin for Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln; David Nasaw for Andrew Carnegie; Daniel Walker Howe for What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848; Drew Gilpin Faust for This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War; Gordon S. Wood for Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815; Ron Chernow for George Washington: A Life; John Lewis Gaddis for George F. Kennan: An American Life; Robert Caro for Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power; and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy for The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire.

About the New-York Historical Society
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