Books by Les Payne
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
by Les Payne & Tamara Payne
🏆 Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
“It is remarkable that the Paynes did not simply visit archives, they created the archive through thousands of eye-witness reports and personal documents. They went way beyond the declassified FBI files and secondhand stories of the legend of Malcolm’s transformation. Payne may have drawn on his journalistic skills to build this biography on first-hand accounts, oral history, but he also worked as a historian to contextualize these contradicting accounts and synthesize them into an extraordinary narrative.” Read more...
The Best Biographies: the 2021 NBCC Shortlist
Elizabeth Taylor, Biographer
Interviews where books by Les Payne were recommended
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1
Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World
by Amy Stanley -
2
The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes
by Zachary D. Carter -
3
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
by Les Payne & Tamara Payne -
4
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
by Heather Clark -
5
The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s
by Maggie Doherty
The Best Biographies: the 2021 NBCC Shortlist, recommended by Elizabeth Taylor
The Best Biographies: the 2021 NBCC Shortlist, recommended by Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor, the author, critic and chair of the National Book Critics’ Circle biography committee, discusses their 2021 shortlist for the title of the best biography—including a revelatory new book about the life of Malcolm X, a group biography of artists in the 1960s, and a book built from a cache of letters written in Japan’s shogun era.
