John Lewis: A Life
~ By David Greenberg
Finalist, Pulitzer Prize in Biography
New York Times Notable Book 2024
Amazon Top Ten Books of the Year 2024
Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2024
Malcolm & Muriel Bell Award, Georgia Historical Society, Best Book on Georgia History.
Finalist, Dayton Literary Peace Prize Nonfiction Award.
Short List, Plutarch Prize, Biographers International Organization.
Short List, Edwards Book Prize, Rodel Institute.
Long List, Biography Award, National Book Critics Circle.
John Lewis was my friend, steadfast ally, and personal hero. I loved him and miss him very much. Every page of David Greenberg’s biography brings him back to life with rich details that reveal not only his legendary moral compass, but the pressures and practical realities he maneuvered in both protest and politics.”
President Bill Clinton
“From Teddy Roosevelt to Barack Obama, David Greenberg has written a brilliant, fast-moving narrative history of the leaders who Monumental. A profoundly moving, indefatigably researched, and absorbingly written biography of one of the true heroes of the civil rights movement. Greenberg has given us a brilliantly comprehensive, thought-provoking, and deeply personal history of an American hero.”.”
Peniel E. Joseph, Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, University of Texas, author of Stokely: A Life
This authoritative biography of civil rights giant John Lewis draws on more than forty archives, untapped private papers, and interviews with Lewis and 250 people who knew him, including Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Only Martin Luther King Jr. contributed more to the civil rights movement in its heyday than John Lewis. He was a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, a Freedom Rider who integrated bus stations in the South, the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, and the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. His vicious beating by state troopers in Selma, Alabama, galvanized political opinion to pass the historic Voting Rights Act. Telling the story of those dramatic years, John Lewis: A Life also reveals fascinating new details about the equally momentous second act of Lewis’s remarkable career, when he rose to be the “conscience of the Congress,” fighting until his last days to keep alive the ideals of nonviolence and interracial harmony. Exhaustively researched and grippingly told, with unexpected new details about his personal and professional relationships, John Lewis: A Life is the definitive biography of a man whose heroism, moral example, and surprising political savvy helped to bring America a new birth of freedom.
“Full of revelations and compulsively readable, this book is—at long last—the biography that the great John Lewis deserves.”
“I knew John Lewis from earliest times. David Greenberg’s brilliant biography captures all the ‘Good Trouble’ John wrought to save his country from itself.”
“John Lewis: A Life is a book especially for these challenging times when so much of Black history is under attack. David Greenberg’s book provides the kind of in-depth history that spells out in vivid detail how obstacles are overcome via people like John and the many others chronicled in the book. A much-needed road map to the effort John embraced—to ‘make America one.’”
“Behold an American life like no other—lived from outsider protest activist to insider savvy politician with epic, spiritual consequences. From hundreds of revealing interviews and exhaustive documentary research, Greenberg captures Lewis’s poetic life in lyrical prose. How dearly we need this model right now of both unsurpassed moral leadership and the craft of biography.”
“Compelling and comprehensive—a landmark! A rich and sober-minded account of one of the most consequential Americans who ever lived. With his perennial commitment to American aspiration and to bearing witness to the gap between that aspiration and tragic reality, often at fundamental peril to himself, Lewis changed a nation. Greenberg’s powerful book shows us how.”
“This is the book we’ve all been awaiting. Deeply researched, beautifully written, and frequently revelatory, Greenberg’s portrait of John Lewis is as inspiring as the civil-rights hero himself.”
“An authoritative and indeed definitive biography of a lovely and deeply principled man who was a true American hero.”
Simon and Schuster | Hardcover | October 2024 | 6.25 x 2 x 9.25 inches / 696 pages | ISBN-13 978-1982142995
Paperback | October 2025 | 6.13 x 1.76 x 9.25 inches / 696 pages | ISBN-13 978-1982143008
