Best-selling author Jonathan Eig has reached agreement with W.W. Norton to write a book on the extraordinary men and women behind the invention of the birth control pill.
Eig is the author of three critically acclaimed books: Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig; Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season; and, most recently: Get Capone: The Secret Plot that Captured America’s Most Wanted Gangster. Luckiest Man and Opening Day were both New York Times best sellers. All three books were named among the best books of the year by media outlets including the Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, and the Chicago Tribune.
In his first three books, Eig used groundbreaking reporting and masterful storytelling to shed new light on misunderstood American legends. In his new book, he employs those same tools to illuminate a forgotten quartet of characters who overcame extraordinary odds to create a drug that changed the world more rapidly and dramatically than anyone dreamed possible, launching the sexual revolution and fundamentally altering human relations.
John Glusman, vice president and editor-in-chief of W.W. Norton, acquired North American and e-book rights in a deal with agent David Black of the David Black Agency.
The book is a narrative set in the 1950s and centering on Margaret Sanger, the controversial crusader who first envisioned the pill; Katherine Dexter McCormick, the philanthropist who bankrolled the project; biologist Gregory Pincus, an outcast from the scientific community who discovered the formula for the pill; and Dr. John Rock, the Catholic gynecologist, who first tested it on women.
Publication has been set for 2014.
