# The Stolen Bicycle *A Biography of Muhammad Ali* — Legendary Biographies No. 175 - **Subject:** Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.) - **Written by:** Devon Marable - **Shelf:** Sport / Boxing - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 196 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-136-9) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Nadia Kerr (ISBN 979-8-90623-612-8) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/175-the-stolen-bicycle.html ## About this book Three autobiographies, an FBI file released only after his death, and the long lawyering of the Clay v. United States defense team: those are the records behind this book. Devon Marable works them with procedural rigour, in the dark and sensational register the subject calls for. Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. came out of Louisville, Kentucky, born there on January 17, 1942. He learned to box at twelve, after his bicycle was stolen, from a white Louisville police officer named Joe Martin who ran a youth gym. Light-heavyweight gold followed at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Sonny Liston went down for the heavyweight title on February 25, 1964. Three weeks later he joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name. Then the refusal. He declined induction into the Vietnam-era draft on April 28, 1967, and was stripped of his title for it. The Supreme Court decided Clay v. United States in his favour on June 28, 1971. The fights people still argue about came after: Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden in March 1971, the Fight of the Century; George Foreman in Zaire on October 30, 1974, beaten with the rope-a-dope; Frazier a third time in Manila in 1975. He retired in 1981. What the book assembles is one man holding two positions at once, heavyweight champion of the world and the principled draft-refuser of his generation, and then a third, in Atlanta in 1996, when he lit the Olympic torch with the tremor of his Parkinson's, a tremor that had been thirty years coming. He died in Phoenix on June 3, 2016, and the Louisville Lip is in the record three times over in his own words. ## Contents 1. The Bicycle 2. The Golden Gloves 3. Rome 4. Sonny Liston I 5. The Name 6. I Ain't Got No Quarrel 7. The Wilderness 8. The Return 9. Zaire 10. Manila 11. Too Long 12. The Tremor 13. The Diplomat 14. The Women 15. The Procession 16. The Athlete 17. The Political Figure 18. The Man ## Questions **Who is The Stolen Bicycle about?** Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Stolen Bicycle — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,897 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 59,500 words, 18 chapters, 196 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Devon Marable spent a decade as a reporter for ESPN The Magazine before turning his attention to book-length biography. His writing focuses on the complex personal realities of athletes whose public careers dominated headlines while their private struggles and triumphs remained largely unrecorded by the daily press. Through meticulous archival research and deep interviewing, he reconstructs the quiet, human moments behind monumental sports histories. His published titles include The Chicago Compound, The Akron Origin, The Crumlin Plumber, and The Stolen Bicycle. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he spends his free time restoring vintage road bicycles and volunteering at a local youth community center.