Historian Manning Marable, 60

NEW YORK - Manning Marable, 60, an influential historian whose forthcoming Malcolm X biography could revise perceptions of the slain civil rights leader, died Friday, just days before the book described as his life's work was to be released.

His wife, Leith Mullings, said that Dr. Marable died from complications of pneumonia at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. She said he had suffered for 24 years from sarcoidosis, an inflammatory lung disease, and had undergone a double lung transplant in July.

"I think his legacy is that he was both a scholar and an activist," she said.

She said that Dr. Marable's latest book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, would be released Monday.

Two decades in the making, the nearly 600-page biography is described as a reevaluation of Malcolm X's life, bringing fresh insight to subjects including his autobiography, which is still assigned in many college courses, to his assassination at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan on Feb. 21, 1965.

The book is based on exhaustive research, including thousands of pages of FBI files and records from the CIA and the State Department.

Blair Kelley, a history professor at North Carolina State University, called Dr. Marable's death a "devastating" loss for black historians.

"I can't believe he died before the book came out. He really deserved the opportunity to be celebrated for his groundbreaking scholarship," Kelley wrote on Twitter.

Benjamin Todd Jealous, president of the NAACP, said in a statement that Dr. Marable's "contributions to the struggle for freedom of African Americans will never be forgotten."

Born in Dayton, Ohio, Dr. Marable wrote in his book Speaking Truth to Power that he was born into the era that witnessed the emergence of Rosa Parks and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as nonviolent movements in the South struggling to break the back of white supremacy.

But he was the child of middle-class black Americans, he wrote, his father a teacher and businessman, his mother an educator and college professor.

He watched from afar as black people in the South rebelled against segregation and racial inequality, and as a teenager he found his emergent political voice writing columns for a neighborhood newspaper.

He wrote that his mother encouraged him to attend Dr. King's funeral "to witness a significant event in our people's history." He served as the local black newspaper's correspondent, he wrote, and marched along with thousands of others during the funeral procession. "With Martin's death, my childhood abruptly ended," he wrote.

He wrote hundreds of papers and nearly 20 books, including the landmark How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, published in 1983.

At Columbia University, where he was a professor, he was the founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies and established the Center for Contemporary Black History.