
Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
-22% $24.84$24.84
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
Save with Used - Very Good
$16.40$16.40
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: OLIVE BRANCH

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable
Color:
-
-
-
- To view this video download Flash Player
-
-
-
VIDEO
-
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (As told to Alex Haley) Hardcover – September 29, 1992
Purchase options and add-ons
In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the inherent racism in a society that denies its nonwhite citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time. The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as the definitive statement of a movement and a man whose work was never completed but whose message is timeless. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America.
Praise for The Autobiography of Malcolm X
“Extraordinary . . . a brilliant, painful, important book.”—The New York Times
“This book will have a permanent place in the literature of the Afro-American struggle.”—I. F. Stone
- Print length528 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBallantine Books
- Publication dateSeptember 29, 1992
- Dimensions6.44 x 1.64 x 9.56 inches
- ISBN-100345379756
- ISBN-13978-0345379757
- Lexile measure1120L
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now

Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.
View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.
Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.
Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
Frequently bought together

More items to explore
- Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.Highlighted by 5,360 Kindle readers
- So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.Highlighted by 4,794 Kindle readers
- We were in that world of Negroes who are both servants and psychologists, aware that white people are so obsessed with their own importance that they will pay liberally, even dearly, for the impression of being catered to and entertained.Highlighted by 3,468 Kindle readers
- It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.Highlighted by 3,088 Kindle readers
- Whites have always hidden or justified all of the guilts they could by ridiculing or blaming Negroes.Highlighted by 2,875 Kindle readers
From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews
Review
“A great book . . . Its dead level honesty, its passion, its exalted purpose, will make it stand as a monument to the most painful truth.”—The Nation
“The most important book I’ll ever read, it changed the way I thought, it changed the way I acted. It has given me courage I didn’t know I had inside me. I’m one of hundreds of thousands whose lives were changed for the better.”—Spike Lee
From the Publisher
I didn't discover it until I was in college (and an elderly female white professor of black lit introduced it to me). Wow! I'm glad she did. But my son read it at age 12. How much better that he's reading Malcolm's
moving story now --rather than late like I did. I believe it will truly affect his life in a very major way.
If I were rich, I'd donate thousands of these books to schools and young folks nationwide.
From the Inside Flap
THE NATION
This hardcover edition of the modern classic, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X, is the result of a unique collaboration between Alex Haley and Malcolm X, whose voice and philosophy resonate from every page, just as his experience and his intelligence continue to speak to millions on the greatest issue of our day: the ongoing African-American struggle for social and economic equality.
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
NIGHTMARE
When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night. Surrounding the house, brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my father to come out. My mother went to the front door and opened it. Standing where they could see her pregnant condition, she told them that she was alone with her three small children, and that my father was away, preaching, in Milwaukee. The Klansmen shouted threats and warnings at her that we had better get out of town because “the good Christian white people” were not going to stand for my father’s “spreading trouble” among the “good” Negroes of Omaha with the “back to Africa” preachings of Marcus Garvey.
My father, the Reverend Earl Little, was a Baptist minister, a dedicated organizer for Marcus Aurelius Garvey’s U.N.I.A. (Universal Negro Improvement Association). With the help of such disciples as my father, Garvey, from his headquarters in New York City’s Harlem, was raising the banner of black-race purity and exhorting the Negro masses to return to their ancestral African homeland—a cause which had made Garvey the most controversial black man on earth.
Still shouting threats, the Klansmen finally spurred their horses and galloped around the house, shattering every window pane with their gun butts. Then they rode off into the night, their torches flaring, as suddenly as they had come.
My father was enraged when he returned. He decided to wait until I was born—which would be soon—and then the family would move. I am not sure why he made this decision, for he was not a frightened Negro, as most then were, and many still are today. My father was a big, six-foot-four, very black man. He had only one eye. How he had lost the other one I have never known. He was from Reynolds, Georgia, where he had left school after the third or maybe fourth grade. He believed, as did Marcus Garvey, that freedom, independence and self-respect could never be achieved by the Negro in America, and that therefore the Negro should leave America to the white man and return to his African land of origin. Among the reasons my father had decided to risk and dedicate his life to help disseminate this philosophy among his people was that he had seen four of his six brothers die by violence, three of them killed by white men, including one by lynching. What my father could not know then was that of the remaining three, including himself, only one, my Uncle Jim, would die in bed, of natural causes. Northern white police were later to shoot my Uncle Oscar. And my father was finally himself to die by the white man’s hands.
It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.
I was my father’s seventh child. He had three children by a previous marriage—Ella, Earl, and Mary, who lived in Boston. He had met and married my mother in Philadelphia, where their first child, my oldest full brother, Wilfred, was born. They moved from Philadelphia to Omaha, where Hilda and then Philbert were born.
I was next in line. My mother was twenty-eight when I was born on May 19, 1925, in an Omaha hospital. Then we moved to Milwaukee, where Reginald was born. From infancy, he had some kind of hernia condition which was to handicap him physically for the rest of his life.
Louise Little, my mother, who was born in Grenada, in the British West Indies, looked like a white woman. Her father was white. She had straight black hair, and her accent did not sound like a Negro’s. Of this white father of hers, I know nothing except her shame about it. I remember hearing her say she was glad that she had never seen him. It was, of course, because of him that I got my reddish-brown “mariny” color of skin, and my hair of the same color. I was the lightest child in our family. (Out in the world later on, in Boston and New York, I was among the millions of Negroes who were insane enough to feel that it was some kind of status symbol to be light-complexioned—that one was actually fortunate to be born thus. But, still later, I learned to hate every drop of that white rapist’s blood that is in me.)
Our family stayed only briefly in Milwaukee, for my father wanted to find a place where he could raise our own food and perhaps build a business. The teaching of Marcus Garvey stressed becoming independent of the white man. We went next, for some reason, to Lansing, Michigan. My father bought a house and soon, as had been his pattern, he was doing freelance Christian preaching in local Negro Baptist churches, and during the week he was roaming about spreading word of Marcus Garvey.
He had begun to lay away savings for the store he had always wanted to own when, as always, some stupid local Uncle Tom Negroes began to funnel stories about his revolutionary beliefs to the local white people. This time, the get-out-of-town threats came from a local hate society called The Black Legion. They wore black robes instead of white. Soon, nearly everywhere my father went, Black Legionnaires were reviling him as an “uppity nigger” for wanting to own a store, for living outside the Lansing Negro district, for spreading unrest and dissention among “the good niggers.”
As in Omaha, my mother was pregnant again, this time with my youngest sister. Shortly after Yvonne was born came the nightmare night in 1929, my earliest vivid memory. I remember being suddenly snatched awake into a frightening confusion of pistol shots and shouting and smoke and flames. My father had shouted and shot at the two white men who had set the fire and were running away. Our home was burning down around us. We were lunging and bumping and tumbling all over each other trying to escape. My mother, with the baby in her arms, just made it into the yard before the house crashed in, showering sparks. I remember we were outside in the night in our underwear, crying and yelling our heads off. The white police and firemen came and stood around watching as the house burned down to the ground.
My father prevailed on some friends to clothe and house us temporarily; then he moved us into another house on the outskirts of East Lansing. In those days Negroes weren’t allowed after dark in East Lansing proper. There’s where Michigan State University is located; I related all of this to an audience of students when I spoke there in January, 1963 (and had the first reunion in a long while with my younger brother, Robert, who was there doing postgraduate studies in psychology). I told them how East Lansing harassed us so much that we had to move again, this time two miles out of town, into the country. This was where my father built for us with his own hands a four-room house. This is where I really begin to remember things—this home where I started to grow up.”
After the fire, I remember that my father was called in and questioned about a permit for the pistol with which he had shot at the white men who set the fire. I remember that the police were always dropping by our house, shoving things around, “just checking” or “looking for a gun.” The pistol they were looking for—which they never found, and for which they wouldn’t issue a permit—was sewed up inside a pillow. My father’s .22 rifle and his shotgun, though, were right out in the open; everyone had them for hunting birds and rabbits and other game.
Product details
- Publisher : Ballantine Books; Reissue edition (September 29, 1992)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 528 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0345379756
- ISBN-13 : 978-0345379757
- Lexile measure : 1120L
- Item Weight : 1.95 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.44 x 1.64 x 9.56 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #68,874 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
Videos
Videos for this product
0:41
Click to play video
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (As told to Alex Haley)
Amazon Videos
About the authors
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book well-written and insightful. They describe the story as fascinating and relatable, describing Malcolm X as a courageous man and one of the greatest leaders in modern history.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book easy to read and engaging. They describe it as an eye-opening, well-written autobiography about a great man. The story is passionate, raw, and fascinating. Readers praise the author's work and mention that it's enjoyable to reread.
"...Mr. Haley did an excellent job with it. The pacing was slow—at times, a little too slow, but I’m glad I was patient. It is an important book to read...." Read more
"...It gave me a clearer picture of the complex person who was Malcolm X. He seems to epitomize the plight of far too many African Americans...." Read more
"In 2025, what has changed? Amazing read. Best book I’ve read in my life. This should be required reading in every academic institution." Read more
"...thoughts and the selected details of his journey within this well structured book!..." Read more
Customers find the book insightful and educational. They say it's spiritual and inspiring, with impressive levels of self-awareness. Readers mention it's one of the most important and best books they have ever read.
"This book taught me a lot about the history of the Black Americans and the history of race in the USA...." Read more
"The most honest book I’ve ever read." Read more
"This book is inspirational and motivational! I highly recommend reading it." Read more
"...The entire book is engrossing. The first 150 pages chronicles his life before his religious conversion...." Read more
Customers find the story engaging and fascinating. They appreciate the author's ability to relate and share the meaning of his life journey. The book dives deep into Malcolm Little's early life events and is praised as one of the best biographies they have read.
"Excellent autobiography. Just wow!..." Read more
"...The level of detail and numerous near misses make for a fascinating story...." Read more
"...It's an astoundingly, refreshing and moving work of non-fiction by the late author Alex Haley that I've ever read and it has changed me and my..." Read more
"...Malcolm's story is passionate, raw and fascinating, from his violent and unstable upbringing through his years as a Harlem hustler through prison to..." Read more
Customers appreciate the character development of Malcolm X. They find him a true hero and an inspiring leader who made a difference for civil rights. The book provides a clearer perspective on his life and his call for justice.
"...This is a driven and resilient man who would become one of the most important figures of the 20th century despite severe traumas and a cruel, unjust..." Read more
"...He is to be respected for his honesty and courage in relating all these events and the way he upheld to his convictions...." Read more
"...A true hero and a true example. May you rest in peace brother." Read more
"...book it has been a pleasure and a learning experience of one of the greatest man that ever lived." Read more
Reviews with images

Malcolm X The Autobiography
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2024This book taught me a lot about the history of the Black Americans and the history of race in the USA. It gave me a clearer picture of the complex person who was Malcolm X. He seems to epitomize the plight of far too many African Americans. I wish that all Americans read this as part of their education. Well written.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2025In 2025, what has changed? Amazing read. Best book I’ve read in my life. This should be required reading in every academic institution.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2025Loved it
- Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2023I was born in 1989! I was introduced to the Nation of Islam first and then I started to learn more about Malcolm!
I’ve watched many YouTube videos on Malcolm and I concluded that Malcolm was a TRUE SOLDIER for his people!
I always admire the amount of information that I knew of Malcolm!
But this book was the equivalent of a sit down and an extensive conversation with Malcolm myself!
Disregarding the stipulations, depictions, narratives and other personal & media driven opinions, I now believe that I truly understand who Malcolm was!
I’m thankful that I had the opportunity to digest his thoughts and the selected details of his journey within this well structured book!
Alex did a phenomenal job with helping Malcolm put together this book!
And personally, I think that a person should only be allowed to exert an opinion on Malcolm only after reading this book!
Thank you Malcolm for your contribution to mankind as we know It. (((salute)))
- Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2021If you had asked me what I thought about Malcolm X before reading the Autobiography, I would have told you he was the militant civil rights leader to contrast the nonviolence of Martin Luther King Jr. But that explanation, which basically encompassed my general knowledge from high school history classes, is such a massive disservice in fully conveying the complexity of a highly fascinating, admirable, and simultaneously tragic human being.
The narration begins with hooded Ku Klux Klan members breaking into his parents’ Nebraska home in the 1920s. Once again, when Malcolm is a child, a white supremacist group burns his new home in Michigan down. In the late 1930s, he and his siblings were separated and government officials instituted their mother at a state hospital. In school, despite Malcolm’s incredible intelligence, his white teachers would call his law ambitions unrealistic and demonstrated the lengths to which the United States suppressed the talents of black people. This is a driven and resilient man who would become one of the most important figures of the 20th century despite severe traumas and a cruel, unjust world.
Witnessing his journey is tragic because he could have gone even further. His assassination is a testament to the strength of his wisdom and fame because those threatened by him and other civil rights leader were nothing but hateful embodiments of a backward time. It is common to hear people talk about Malcolm X as a controversial figure because while he was outwardly hateful of white people for a long time, he talks about a lot of uncomfortable ideas. It is a shame we did not get to see him explore them in greater depth.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2024Excellent autobiography. Just wow! I learned so much about Malcom X. I was devastated in finding out that the person that assassinated him was also in the Nation of Islam. A brotha if you will. My heart broke for his wife and children. Malcom did so much for Elijah Muhammad only for him to betray him. There's a saying that goes: It be your own kind sometimes. Ain't that the truth!
- Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2024The Malcolm Little presented in this autobiography written by the novelist Alex Haley -- who would go on to write "Roots," one of the seminal reads of my college Freshman year -- is extremely unlikable. Yes, we see how he turned into a hustler, crook, and drug addict in Harlem; it was due to his hardscrabble childhood w/ too many children for an overworked mother to feed and raise. The poor woman was institutionalized b/c she was trying to raise eight Black children on her own after their father was murdered! It was so hard to read about his tough childhood in Michigan before his sister took him in when he should have been in high school. Instead, he started working as a shoe-shine boy in a dance club, which changed his life, to say the least.
How did Malcolm Little, the "thug," (to use today's vernacular) end up as the religious-firebrand leader Malcolm X? Meeting Allah while in prison, short and simple. The Rev. Elijah Muhammed, the leader of the Nation of Islam, answered Malcolm's letter from prison. Thus began Malcolm's devotion to Mr. Muhammed and his church. Let Malcolm explain it: "Awareness came surging up in me--how deeply the religion of Islam had reached down into the mud to lift me up, to save me from what I inevitably would have been: a dead criminal in a grave, or, if still alive, a flint-hard, bitter, thirty-seven-year-old convict in some penitentiary, or insane asylum...But Allah had blessed me to lift myself up from the muck and the mire of this rotting world." p. 330.
Mr. Muhammed eventually turned against Malcolm when Malcolm learned Mr. Muhammed's dirty secret. After his brain-bursting trip to Mecca and being introduced to "true" Islam (in Malcolm's words), Malcolm was more on fire for Allah than ever and was an in-demand speaker all over the United States. However, this made him a marked man by the Nation of Islam. He was assassinated not long thereafter.
Who knows what greater heights Malcolm X might have achieved? How many more people he would have introduced to the peacefulness and simplicity of a life dedicated to Allah?
This was an uncomfortable read; I had to put it down for days at a time, b/c honestly, Malcolm just wasn't always likable: his extreme hatred of white people - while understandable - got upsetting. I am proud that Malcolm X is finally represented in Statuary Hall at the US Capitol for the State of Nebraska, but I probably wouldn't have liked him personally. 4 stars for an important, long-delayed read of his Autobiography.
Top reviews from other countries
-
Vibe SustentávelReviewed in Brazil on January 19, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Liberdade de pensamento por qualquer meio necessário.
Livro denso. Mais de 500 páginas. Em Inglês. Mas vale cada palavra.
-
DenizReviewed in Germany on November 16, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars Eine Lebensreise in Worten: Die Autobiographie von Malcolm X
Die Autobiographie von Malcolm X, mit einem neuen Vorwort von Attallah Shabazz, ist ein kraftvolles Zeugnis einer außergewöhnlichen Lebensreise. Das Buch, das in Zusammenarbeit mit Alex Haley entstand, erzählt die bewegende Geschichte eines Mannes, der vom Verbrecher zum Bürgerrechtsaktivisten wurde.
Die ehrlichen und schonungslosen Erzählungen von Malcolm X bieten nicht nur Einblicke in seine persönlichen Herausforderungen und Triumphe, sondern werfen auch ein Licht auf die politische und soziale Landschaft seiner Zeit. Die scharfsinnige Analyse von Rassismus, Ungerechtigkeit und persönlichem Wachstum macht dieses Buch zu einem zeitlosen Klassiker.
Die Einführung von Attallah Shabazz verleiht dem Werk zusätzliche Tiefe, indem sie einen modernen Blick auf die Bedeutung von Malcolm X und sein Vermächtnis wirft. Shabazz, als Tochter von Malcolm X, bringt eine persönliche Perspektive ein, die das Erbe ihres Vaters weiterführt.
Die Autobiographie fesselt den Leser von Anfang bis Ende. Malcolm Xs lebendige Sprache, sein Humor und seine Weisheit ziehen den Leser in seine Welt und lassen ihn an den Höhen und Tiefen seines Lebens teilhaben. Der Leser erlebt nicht nur die Transformation des Mannes Malcolm Little zu Malcolm X, sondern auch die Transformation einer Ära der Bürgerrechtsbewegung.
Dieses Buch ist nicht nur eine faszinierende Lebensgeschichte, sondern auch ein kraftvolles Manifest für persönliche Freiheit, soziale Gerechtigkeit und den unerschütterlichen Glauben an Veränderung. Die Autobiographie von Malcolm X bleibt ein bedeutendes Werk, das die Leser dazu inspiriert, über Vorurteile und Ungerechtigkeiten nachzudenken und sich für eine bessere Welt einzusetzen.
-
DavidReviewed in Mexico on January 9, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente libro
Es la mejor opción para quien puede leerlo en Inglés. Es barato, es un libro increíble, no es una versión hecha para coleccionarse pero la calidad es buena, la verdad es dinero bien gastado.
En cuanto al contenido del libro. La historia de malcolm es impactante, y leerlo de sus propias palabras es aún más revelador y contundente. Me alegro haberlo leído en su idioma original.
- Mohammed Jawad AliReviewed in India on March 23, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars His message and work lives on!
One of the finest books on one of the greatest figures of the 20th century, MalcomX. This book is a must read for every person of colour and every minority who are discriminated at the hands of the powerful, for the people who are lost and do not know their cause, for people who continue to accept brutality without doing something to defend themself. It was a an important literary work of the last century and it rings much more significance in this century where black people are still fighting for their right towards equality and peace. Malcom X, was good Human being and a thoughtful leader who accepted his shortcomings and corrected them along the way. He was assasinated five decades ago but his message and work lives on in the hearts of millions of black people and other people of colour all over the world.
- MOHAMMED RAFIQReviewed in Saudi Arabia on December 25, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Good book to Spend time with............
Awsome book to read with the bio graphies. Good book to spend time with..............