Jonathan Eig


Jonathan Eig is an American journalist and the author of five books. His most recent book, Ali: A Life, is a biography of Muhammad Ali.

Biography

Eig was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Monsey, New York. His father was an accountant and his mother was a stay-at-home mom and community activist. Eig began working for his hometown newspaper when he was 16. He attended Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, graduating in 1986 with a bachelor's degree. After college he worked as a news reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Dallas Morning News, Chicago magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. Eig has taught writing at Columbia College Chicago and lectures at Northwestern. He has written as a freelancer for many outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, and online edition of The New Yorker. He is married to Jennifer Tescher and has three children. He lives in Chicago.
Eig appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in May 2010. He has appeared in two PBS documentaries—Prohibition and Jackie Robinson—made by Ken Burns and Florentine Films. He is currently working with Burns as a consulting producer on a documentary about Muhammad Ali.
In 2016, Eig appeared on AMC's, talking about Al Capone.

Reception

In 2019 Men's Health magazine named Eig's book "Ali: A Life" . In 2020, Esquire magazine called "Ali" one of the .
Eig's first book was Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig. Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season was his second book. For his third book, Get Capone, Eig discovered thousands of pages of never-before-reported government documents on the government's case against Capone. The Birth of the Pill, Eig's fourth book, told the story of the renegades who invented the first oral contraceptive.
In a 2017 review of Ali: A Life, Joyce Carol Oates, writing for The New York Times, said: "This richly researched, sympathetic yet unsparing portrait of a controversial figure for whom the personal and the political dramatically fused could not come at a more appropriate time in our beleaguered American history…. As Muhammad Ali’s life was an epic of a life so “Ali: A Life” is an epic of a biography. Much in its pages will be familiar to those with some knowledge of boxing but even the familiar may be glimpsed from a new perspective in Eig's fluent prose; for pages in succession its narrative reads like a novel — a suspenseful novel with a cast of vivid characters who prevail through decades and who help to define the singular individual who was both a brilliantly innovative, incomparably charismatic heavyweight boxer and a public figure whose iconic significance shifted radically through the decades as in an unlikely fairy tale in which the most despised athlete in American history becomes, by the 21st century, the most beloved athlete in American history.”

Published works