“Parr focuses on the life of my father, and on how his heart and mind changed during his six and a half years in Massachusetts prisons. . . . In Malcolm Before X, Parr, through prison files, archival prison newspapers and microfilm, gets us as close as we can to my father’s years behind bars.”—Ilyasah Shabazz, author of Growing Up X: A Memoir by the Daughter of Malcolm X

"Malcolm Before X is strikingly original. Parr's prodigious research gives us the most richly documented book about Malcolm's early life that we will ever have. His account of how a good prison library can spark a personal transformation should resonate widely. A superb achievement."—David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the Cross and Rising Star

“More than any other previous biography of Malcolm X that I have read, in Malcolm Before X, Patrick Parr delivers an air-tight, well documented chronology of the well-known episodes in Malcolm’s early life combined with a compelling, revelatory portrait of the six and a half transformative years he spent in prison.”—Abdur-Rahman Muhammad is a scholar, historian, journalist, writer, activist, and authority on the life and legacy of Malcolm X

“Patrick Parr has produced an extraordinary act of historical research and recovery. By taking Malcolm X’s prison years seriously, Parr helps to restore the human being behind the legend. This groundbreaking book, which should be read by every student, researcher, and scholar of Malcolm X and postwar American history, offers the most detailed examination to date of Malcolm X’s prison years. In so doing, Parr provides the most brilliantly nuanced understanding and analysis of Malcolm Little’s transformation into Malcolm X. Magnificent.”—Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century

"Patrick Parr has managed an extraordinary feat. In telling the story of Malcolm Little the child, the student, the burglar, the prisoner, he has helped us to more fully understand Malcolm X the orator, the leader, the radical thinker. Parr has unearthed remarkable documentary sources to tell the gripping and important story of the shaping of a great mind."—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of King: A Life

“Parr offers an extraordinary portrait of Malcolm by relying on a cornucopia of significant primary sources that, in many instances, no one—literally no one—has ever tapped before. His rare and extremely commendable detective work shows on virtually every page.”—Keith Miller, author of Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources