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Longlisted � National Book Award (Nonfiction) Best Books of Fall 2020 � O, the Oprah Magazine An epic biography of Malcolm X finally emerges, drawing on hundreds of hours of the author�s interviews, rewriting much of the known narrative. Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize�winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X�all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates, street friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam figures, FBI moles and cops, and political leaders around the world. His goal was ambitious: to transform what would become over a hundred hours of interviews into an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction. The result is this historic biography that conjures a never-before-seen world of its protagonist, a work whose title is inspired by a phrase Malcolm X used when he saw his Hartford followers stir with purpose, as if the dead were truly arising, to overcome the obstacles of racism. Setting Malcolm�s life not only within the Nation of Islam but against the larger backdrop of American history, the book traces the life of one of the twentieth century�s most politically relevant figures �from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary.� In tracing Malcolm X�s life from his Nebraska birth in 1925 to his Harlem assassination in 1965, Payne provides searing vignettes culled from Malcolm�s Depression-era youth, describing the influence of his Garveyite parents: his father, Earl, a circuit-riding preacher who was run over by a street car in Lansing, Michigan, in 1929, and his mother, Louise, who continued to instill black pride in her children after Earl�s death. Filling each chapter with resonant drama, Payne follows Malcolm�s exploits as a petty criminal in Boston and Harlem in the 1930s and early 1940s to his religious awakening and conversion to the Nation of Islam in a Massachusetts penitentiary. With a biographer�s unwavering determination, Payne corrects the historical record and delivers extraordinary revelations�from the unmasking of the mysterious NOI founder �Fard Muhammad,� who preceded Elijah Muhammad; to a hair-rising scene, conveyed in cinematic detail, of Malcolm and Minister Jeremiah X Shabazz�s 1961 clandestine meeting with the KKK; to a minute-by-minute account of Malcolm X�s murder at the Audubon Ballroom. Introduced by Payne�s daughter and primary researcher, Tamara Payne, who, following her father�s death, heroically completed the biography, The Dead Are Arising is a penetrating and riveting work that affirms the centrality of Malcolm X to the African American freedom struggle.