# The Hayvenhurst Years *A Biography of Michael Jackson* — Legendary Biographies No. 189 - **Subject:** Michael Joseph Jackson - **Written by:** Keisha Morgan - **Shelf:** Music / Pop - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 207 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 207 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-139-0) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Nadia Kerr (ISBN 979-8-90623-218-2) - **Content notes:** sexual abuse allegations; substance use; fatal overdose Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/189-the-hayvenhurst-years.html ## About this book June 25, 2009, the rented Holmby Hills home at 100 North Carolwood Drive. Michael Joseph Jackson, fifty, the King of Pop, is found in cardiac arrest in his second-floor bedroom by his personal physician Conrad Murray. He has been preparing for the This Is It fifty-show comeback residency at the O2 Arena in London. He is pronounced dead at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center at 2:26 p.m. The cause of death is propofol intoxication. Murray is convicted of involuntary manslaughter in November 2011 and serves two years. Keisha Morgan's biography opens earlier — in Gary, Indiana, where Michael was born in 1958, the eighth of ten children of a Gary Steel Works crane operator and a Jehovah's Witness homemaker — and follows the arc through the long Jackson 5 Motown years, the 1979 Off the Wall, the November 1982 Thriller that became the best-selling album of all time, the Bad and Dangerous and HIStory albums, the long Neverland Ranch years and the 1993 Jordan Chandler settlement, the 2003 Santa Barbara County criminal indictment and the 2005 trial that acquitted him on all counts, the long Bahrain and Las Vegas and Ireland exiles, the 2009 This Is It comeback announcement, and the June 25 death. What emerges is a portrait of the King of Pop — the best-selling solo recording artist in history and the subject of the most thoroughly documented child-sexual-abuse allegations of any major American entertainer of the late twentieth century, a record the Leaving Neverland documentary of 2019 has continued to compel the country to read. ## Contents 1. 2300 Jackson Street 2. The Jackson 5 3. The Boy in the Mirror 4. Quincy 5. Thriller 6. The Moonwalk 7. Neverland 8. The Face 9. Bad, Dangerous, HIStory 10. Evan Chandler 11. The Sony War 12. The Bashir Trap 13. Lisa Marie and the Marriages 14. This Is It 15. Propofol 16. June 25, 2009 17. Leaving Neverland -- Contested 18. John Branca and the Estate 19. The Sound Remains 20. The Estate ## Questions **Who is The Hayvenhurst Years about?** Michael Joseph Jackson. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Hayvenhurst Years — 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 4,491 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,000 words, 20 chapters, 207 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: sexual abuse allegations; substance use; fatal overdose. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Keisha Morgan is an American cultural biographer and essayist who writes the lives that pop culture devoured. Born in Detroit, raised between Chicago and Brooklyn, she came to nonfiction through music journalism — five years at Vibe in the late 2000s, then long-form work for The Atlantic, where she ran the culture section before leaving in 2021 to write books full-time. Her subjects are the artists and entertainers culture loves and then loses: R. Kelly, Britney Spears, Anna Nicole Smith, Wes Craven, Ana Mendieta, Bruce and Brandon Lee, Octavia Butler, Anthony Bourdain. She lives in Brooklyn with two cats and an unreasonable record collection.