Malcolm Before X: African American Intellectual History

by Patrick Parr, James Fouhey (Narrator)

In February 1946, when twenty-year-old Malcolm Little was sentenced to eight to ten years in a maximum-security prison, he was a petty criminal and street hustler in Boston. By the time he was paroled in August 1952, he had transformed into a voracious reader, joined the Black Muslims, and was poised to become Malcolm X, one of the most prominent and important intellectuals of the civil rights era. While scholars and commentators have exhaustively detailed, analyzed, and debated Malcolm X's post-prison life, they have not explored these six and a half transformative years in any depth.

Paying particular attention to his time in prison, Patrick Parr's Malcolm Before X provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking examination of the first twenty-seven years of Malcolm X's life (1925–1965).

Parr utilizes a trove of previously overlooked documents that include prison files and prison newspapers to immerse the listener into the unique cultures—at times brutal and at times instructional—of Charlestown State Prison, the Concord Reformatory, and the Norfolk Prison Colony. It was at these institutions that Malcolm devoured books, composed poetry, boxed, debated, and joined the Nation of Islam, changing the course of his life and setting the stage for a decade of antiracist activism that would fundamentally reshape American culture.

Audible Audio

Published April 29, 2025

About the author

Patrick Parr's first book was The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age, a 2019 Washington State Book Award finalist. The book was the culmination of five years of research, which included more than a dozen interviews with friends who'd known King during his years at Crozer Theological Seminary (1948-1951).

For his second book, Parr used newspaper archives and completed interviews with over twenty Notre Dame graduates to write One Week in America: The 1968 Notre Dame Literary Festival and a Changing Nation. Parr also incorporated into the story never-before-published letters from festival authors Joseph Heller (Catch-22), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five), Wright Morris (The Field of Vision) and Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead). The book also depicts the last week of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, and Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency.

Parr's third book is Malcolm Before X, published by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Other work has appeared in The Atlantic, American History Magazine, Politico, History Today, The American Prospect, The New York Daily News and The Boston Globe. In 2014 he was awarded an Artist Trust Fellowship for his literary career. He lives with his wife near Tokyo and teaches writing at Lakeland University Japan.