The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
by Les Payne and Tamara Payne
Summary
Les Payne spent nearly three decades interviewing everyone he could find who had known Malcolm X, family members, childhood friends, fellow inmates and Nation of Islam colleagues, before his own death in 2018 left the biography unfinished. His daughter Tamara Payne, who had worked alongside him as his primary researcher throughout the project, completed the manuscript, and the finished book follows Malcolm X from a childhood shadowed by his father's disputed death when Malcolm was six and his mother's institutionalization seven years later, through the criminal years and prison sentence that led him to the Nation of Islam.
The book follows Malcolm X's rapid rise into the Nation's most visible spokesman, building temples and membership nationally through the late 1950s, and traces the break with Elijah Muhammad that followed once Malcolm learned of his leader's own conduct and grew frustrated with the Nation's refusal to answer racial violence more directly. It gives real weight to his April 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca, where praying alongside Muslims of every race reshaped his views on integration, and it draws on Les Payne's original interviews to reconstruct the year between that pilgrimage and his assassination at the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965, when he was shot twenty one times by men identified as Nation of Islam members.
Reading the book means following decades of a working journalist's own original interviews rather than secondary sources, filled out and framed by his daughter after his death, and it suits a reader who wants Malcolm X's transformation from street hustler to Nation of Islam minister to independent political thinker traced through the people who actually lived alongside him at each stage. The collaboration between father and daughter, one gathering the material and the other finishing the book he never got to write, is itself part of what the finished biography now represents.
Historical Context & Significance
The Dead Are Arising won the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, an unusual double for a book whose principal author died before it was finished.
Kirkus Reviews called it a superb biography and an essential addition to the literature on Malcolm X, Publishers Weekly named it richly detailed and extraordinary, and the New York Times Book Review said no one had written a more poetic account of his life. The book has become a standard modern biography of Malcolm X specifically because of the decades of original interviews behind it, research Les Payne began while still an active journalist and that his daughter carried across the finish line after his death from a heart attack in March 2018. That year's finalists were Heather Clark's Red Comet, on Sylvia Plath, and Amy Stanley's Stranger in the Shogun's City.