| The New Yorker is celebrating its ninety-ninth birthday this month, a proud milestone for a magazine that is both a product of long-standing tradition and in a constant state of evolution. A major moment of change came in the fall of 1992, when the newly appointed editor, Tina Brown, published the first full-page photo in New Yorker history. The image would need to be special, both in its choice of subject and in the person who produced it. To kick off the new era, Brown selected no less an artist than Richard Avedon, the pioneering portraitist and fashion photographer. Nearly thirty years earlier, he had captured an arresting rendering of Malcolm X—the African American activist born, it happened, in the same year as the magazine, and who was assassinated in upper Manhattan fifty-nine years ago today. The photograph accompanied a sweeping look at Malcolm’s remarkable biography, from a childhood of extreme deprivation to a life of national, and then international, influence. Along the way, the writer Marshall Frady examines the turning points in Malcolm’s life: drug dealing and arrest; a religious conversion in prison; his role in building the Nation of Islam and then his expulsion from it; sharply changing opinions on race; and a brief encounter with Martin Luther King, Jr. The man who emerges is as strikingly textured as the image that appeared with the article. “Malcolm, in fact, was killed in the midst of a kind of metamorphosis,” Frady writes. “Indeed, at no point in his life could Malcolm cease struggling, as if by dim but resistless instinct, for more light.” | 
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