#1 New York Times Bestseller An intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime U.s. congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the presentfrom the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Soul of America Named One Of The Best Books Of The Year By The Washington Post And Cosmopolitan John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. From an early age, Lewis learned that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality. At the age of four, Lewis, ambitious to become a minister, practiced by preaching to his family's chickens. When his mother cooked one of the chickens, the boy refused to eat ithis first act, he wryly recalled, of nonviolent protest.