“You’re another of the white man’s tools sent to spy!” Malcolm told Alex Haley when they first met. Photograph by Eve Arnold / MAGNUM

On summer nights, in 1963, Malcolm X drove his blue Oldsmobile from Mosque No. 7, the Harlem headquarters of the Nation of Islam, to an apartment building on Grove Street, in Greenwich Village, where a freelance writer named Alex Haley sat waiting for him in an eight-by-ten-foot studio. There, the two would remain until early morning. Haley sat at a desk typing notes while Malcolm—tall, austere, dressed always in a dark suit, a white shirt, and a narrow dark tie—drank cup after cup of coffee, paced the room, and talked. What emerged was the hegira of Malcolm’s life as a black man in mid-century America: his transformation from Malcolm Little, born in Omaha to troubled parents whose salve against racist harassment and violence was the black-nationalist creed of Marcus Garvey; to Detroit Red, a numbers-running hustler on the streets of Boston and New York; to a convicted felon known among fellow-prisoners as Satan; to Malcolm X, a charismatic deputy to the Nation of Islam’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, and the most electrifying proponent of black nationalism alive. “My whole life has been a chronology of changes,” Malcolm told Haley one night, and, in a few months, he would transform himself yet again, becoming El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, a Sunni Muslim.

When Haley first met Malcolm, in 1959, he had recently retired from a twenty-year career in the Coast Guard, and had embarked on a career as a journalist. He soon published articles about the Nation of Islam and Malcolm in Reader’s Digest and The Saturday Evening Post. Haley was not at all in accord with the Nation’s theology or its vehement ideology of racial separatism. He was a liberal Republican, an integrationist, who admired A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—the mainstream civil-rights leaders whom Malcolm denounced as “stooges” and “lackeys.”

“You’re another of the white man’s tools sent to spy!” Malcolm told Haley at their first meeting. Despite their obvious differences, though, Malcolm thought that Haley’s articles had been fair. After interviewing Malcolm for Playboy, Haley persuaded him to collaborate on an “as told to” autobiography. They would split a twenty-thousand-dollar advance from Doubleday.

The first sessions on Grove Street were frustrating, as Malcolm spent countless hours praising the wisdom of Elijah Muhammad, and avoided all mention of his own life. Then came a night when Haley asked Malcolm, “I wonder if you’d tell me something about your mother?” Malcolm’s voice softened. Walking in a tight circle, he said, “She was always standing over the stove, trying to stretch whatever we had to eat.” He began to tell the story of his life, how the family’s house was burned to the ground by the white racists of the Black Legion, how his white teacher told him he could never be a lawyer (“That’s no realistic goal for a nigger!”). They talked until dawn, accumulating much of a first chapter, which Haley titled “Nightmare.”

Haley’s ambition was to write a bestseller; in Malcolm, he recognized not a great man, necessarily, but a great story, even a dangerous one. By 1964, Malcolm had fallen out with the Nation of Islam, and he became convinced, rightly, that he did not have long to live. Followed all his public life by the F.B.I. and the police, Malcolm was now being pursued by the Nation, with its thuggish “pipe squads,” the Fruit of Islam. Haley cared for Malcolm, but he cared for the book no less. “I sometimes think that you do not really understand what will be the effect of this book,” he wrote Malcolm in a long letter. “There has never been, at least not in our time, any other book like it. Do you realize that to do these things you will have to be alive?” In order to fend off deadlines, meanwhile, Haley wrote buoyantly to his agent and editors, insisting that the book would “sweep the market like wildfire”: “For this man is so hot, so HOT, a subject . . . this book is so pregnant with millions or more sales potential, including to make foreign rights hotly bid for!”

On February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom, in Washington Heights, multiple assassins fired shotguns and pistols at Malcolm as he stepped to the lectern for a speech. Two hours after hearing the news, Haley wrote to his agent, “None of us would have had it be this way, but since this book represent’s [sic] Malcolm’s sole financial legacy to his widow and four little daughters . . . I’m just glad that it’s ready for the press now at a peak of interest for what will be international large sales, and paperback, and all.”

The publisher, Nelson Doubleday, fearing for the lives of his staff, cancelled his deal with Haley; Barney Rosset, the bold and ingenious proprietor of Grove Press, picked up the contract. He would not be sorry. Between 1965 and 1977, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” sold six million copies worldwide, and the book continues to sell briskly, both to general readers and to students for whom it is required reading. In 1992, Spike Lee set off a bout of “Malcolmania,” with his three-hour-plus film. In its wake, people as unlikely as Dan Quayle talked sympathetically about Malcolm. A poll showed that eighty-four per cent of African-Americans between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four saw Malcolm as “a hero for black Americans today.” The video for Public Enemy’s “Shut ’Em Down” put Malcolm’s face on the dollar bill. A vivid but secondary figure in his own time, Malcolm X had achieved the status of an icon. And he did it with a book that he never lived to see published.

For nearly twenty years, Manning Marable, a historian at Columbia, labored on what he hoped would be a definitive scholarly work on Malcolm X. During this period, Marable struggled with sarcoidosis, a pulmonary disease, and even underwent a double lung transplant. Recently, he completed his rigorous and evenhanded biography, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” (Viking; $30), but, in an echo of his subject’s fate, he died on the eve of publication. One of his goals was to grapple with Malcolm’s autobiography, and although he finds much to admire about Malcolm, he makes it clear that the book’s drama sometimes comes at the expense of fact. Haley wanted to write a “potboiler that would sell,” Marable observes, and Malcolm was accustomed to exaggerating his exploits—“the number of his burglaries, the amount of marijuana he sold to musicians, and the like.” Malcolm, like St. Augustine, embellished his sins in order to heighten the drama of his reform.

The literary urge outran the knowable facts even in the most crucial episode in Malcolm’s childhood. One evening, in 1931, in Lansing, Michigan, when Malcolm was six, his father, Earl Little, a part-time Garveyite teacher, went to collect “chicken money” from families who bought poultry from him. That night, he was found bleeding to death on the streetcar tracks. The authorities ruled his death an accident, but Malcolm’s mother, Louise, was sure he had been beaten by the Black Legion and laid on the tracks to be run over and killed. Perhaps he had been, but, as Marable notes, nobody knew for sure. The autobiography (and Lee’s film) presents the ostensible murder as established fact, and yet Malcolm himself, in a 1963 speech at Michigan State University, referred to the death as accidental.