Eig was born inBrooklyn, New York, and grew up inMonsey, New York. He isJewish.[2] His father was an accountant and his mother was a stay-at-home mom and community activist. Eig began working for his hometown newspaper when he was 16. He attendedNorthwestern University'sMedill School of Journalism, graduating in 1986 with a bachelor's degree. After college he worked as a news reporter for theNew Orleans Times-Picayune,The Dallas Morning News,Chicago magazine, andThe Wall Street Journal. Eig has taught writing atColumbia College Chicago and lectures at Northwestern. He has written as a freelancer for many outlets, includingThe New York Times,Washington Post, and online edition ofThe New Yorker. He is married to Jennifer Tescher and has three children. He lives in Chicago.
Eig appeared onThe Daily Show with Jon Stewart in May 2010.[3] He has appeared in three PBS documentaries—Prohibition,Jackie Robinson andMuhammad Ali—made byKen Burns and Florentine Films.[4]
In 2019,Men's Health magazine named Eig's bookAli: A Life the 23rd best sports book of all time.[5]In 2020,Esquire magazine calledAli one of the 35 best sports books ever written.[6]Esquire also called Eig's bookLuckiest Man one of the 100 best baseball books of all time.[7]
Eig's first book wasLuckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig (2005).Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season was his second book. For his third book,Get Capone, Eig discovered thousands of pages of never-before-reported government documents on the government's case against Capone.The Birth of the Pill (2014), Eig's fourth book, told the story of the renegades who invented the first oral contraceptive.[8] It was announced in 2016 thatThe Birth of the Pill had been optioned for television as a drama.[9]
In a 2017 review ofAli: A Life,Joyce Carol Oates, writing forThe New York Times, said: "This richly researched, sympathetic yet unsparing portrait of a controversial figure for whom the personal and the political dramatically fused could not come at a more appropriate time in our beleaguered American history…. As Muhammad Ali's life was an epic of a life soAli: A Life is an epic of a biography. Much in its pages will be familiar to those with some knowledge of boxing but even the familiar may be glimpsed from a new perspective in Eig's fluent prose; for pages in succession its narrative reads like a novel — a suspenseful novel with a cast of vivid characters who prevail through decades and who help to define the singular individual who was both a brilliantly innovative, incomparably charismatic heavyweight boxer and a public figure whose iconic significance shifted radically through the decades as in an unlikely fairy tale in which the most despised athlete in American history becomes, by the 21st century, the most beloved athlete in American history."[10]
