An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad

An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad, Claude Andrew Clegg III's 1997 biography from St. Martin's Press, is a scholarly biography using extensive archival and interview research to reconstruct the Nation of Islam leader's life beyond the movement's own official narratives. Its strength is that archival and interview grounding independent of the movement itself. Its limit is that, like any single biography of a controversial figure, some interpretive judgments are contested by the Nation of Islam's own accounts of its founder; readers wanting the movement's own perspective should also consult its own publications.