the autobiography of malcolm x audio book

We went back over things many times to get them right. She would stop me if even an inflection was a little wrong, and we would go back over it. She was my audience, and she was not just an avid listener, she was an active listener. The other secret weapon is Nicole Shelton, our director. So my job is just to use my instrument in the service of Malcolm, the brilliant thinker and political activist, and of this brilliant writer, the wordsmith, Alex Haley. I was blessed with a gift for the dramatic art.

How did you tackle the difficulty of mirroring the escalation in Malcolm X’s tone, as a man and as a narrator, over the course of the book? “If I’ve done my job well,” Fishburne said, “the listener will come away feeling as if they’re Alex Haley, and Malcolm is speaking directly to them.” “He had to earn his trust.”īut this narrative is a testament to the intimacy they developed over time. “I don’t think Malcolm was all that trusting of Alex Haley in the beginning,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Los Angeles. 10, Laurence Fishburne - an Oscar-nominated actor whose roles have included Nelson Mandela and Justice Thurgood Marshall - knew he had a tall order ahead of him. Asked to narrate its first-ever unabridged audiobook recording, which Audible will release Sept. The resulting memoir has become a foundational document not just in the history of American civil rights, but in 20th-century thought.

During all-night interviews in Haley’s cramped Greenwich Village studio, Malcolm X recalled his Omaha upbringing by parents who decried racism and supported Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalism his turn to hustling and crime as a young man in New York City and how he found, was transformed by and eventually departed from the Nation of Islam. Published in 1965, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” was not, originally, Malcolm X’s idea.īut in 1963, Alex Haley, a writer who would later win the Pulitzer Prize for “Roots,” convinced his skeptical subject to share the story of his life.

The autobiography of malcolm x audio book