[21] Though Haley is ostensibly a ghostwriter on the Autobiography, modern scholars tend to treat him as an essential and core collaborator who acted as an invisible figure in the composition of the work.

[23] Manning Marable considers the view of Haley as simply a ghostwriter as a deliberate narrative construction of black scholars of the day who wanted to see the book as a singular creation of a dynamic leader and martyr.

[26] In a view shared by Eakin, Stone and Dyson, psychobiographical writer Eugene Victor Wolfenstein writes that Haley performed the duties of a quasi-psychoanalytic Freudian psychiatrist and spiritual confessor.

[27][28] Gillespie suggests, and Wolfenstein agrees, that the act of self-narration was itself a transformative process that spurred significant introspection and personal change in the life of its subject.

[36] Wideman expounds upon the "inevitable compromise" of biographers,[35] and argues that in order to allow readers to insert themselves into the broader socio-psychological narrative, neither coauthor's voice is as strong as it could have been.

The sound of the man's narration may be represented by vocabulary, syntax, imagery, graphic devices of various sorts—quotation marks, punctuation, line breaks, visual patterning of white space and black space, markers that encode print analogs to speech—vernacular interjections, parentheses, ellipses, asterisks, footnotes, italics, dashes ....[35] In the body of the Autobiography, Wideman writes, Haley's authorial agency is seemingly absent: "Haley does so much with so little fuss ... an approach that appears so rudimentary in fact conceals sophisticated choices, quiet mastery of a medium".

[34] Wideman argues that Haley wrote the body of the Autobiography in a manner of Malcolm X's choosing and the epilogue as an extension of the biography itself, his subject having given him carte blanche for the chapter.

[39] Stone also reminds the reader that collaboration is a cooperative endeavor, requiring more than Haley's prose alone can provide, "convincing and coherent" as it may be:[40] Though a writer's skill and imagination have combined words and voice into a more or less convincing and coherent narrative, the actual writer [Haley] has no large fund of memories to draw upon: the subject's [Malcolm X] memory and imagination are the original sources of the arranged story and have also come into play critically as the text takes final shape.

[41] In Stone's estimation, supported by Wideman, the source of autobiographical material and the efforts made to shape them into a workable narrative are distinct, and of equal value in a critical assessment of the collaboration that produced the Autobiography.

[40] The collaboration between Malcolm X and Haley took on many dimensions; editing, revising and composing the Autobiography was a power struggle between two men with sometimes competing ideas of the final shape for the book.

"[35] Haley played an important role in persuading Malcolm X not to re-edit the book as a polemic against Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam at a time when Haley already had most of the material needed to complete the book, and asserted his authorial agency when the Autobiography's "fractured construction",[46] caused by Malcolm X's rift with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, "overturned the design"[47] of the manuscript and created a narrative crisis.

Telephoning Malcolm X, I reminded him of his previous decisions, and I stressed that if those chapters contained such telegraphing to readers of what was to lie ahead, then the book would automatically be robbed of some of its building suspense and drama.

[45] Haley's warning to avoid "telegraphing to readers" and his advice about "building suspense and drama" demonstrate his efforts to influence the narrative's content and assert his authorial agency while ultimately deferring final discretion to Malcolm X.

[49] In the words of Eakin, "Because this complex vision of his existence is clearly not that of the early sections of the Autobiography, Alex Haley and Malcolm X were forced to confront the consequences of this discontinuity in perspective for the narrative, already a year old.

[52] Marable studied the Autobiography manuscript "raw materials" archived by Haley's biographer, Anne Romaine, and described a critical element of the collaboration, Haley's writing tactic to capture the voice of his subject accurately, a disjoint system of data mining that included notes on scrap paper, in-depth interviews, and long "free style" discussions.

[32] The timing of the collaboration meant that Haley occupied an advantageous position to document the multiple conversion experiences of Malcolm X and his challenge was to form them, however incongruent, into a cohesive workable narrative.

Dyson suggests that "profound personal, intellectual, and ideological changes ... led him to order events of his life to support a mythology of metamorphosis and transformation".

They also revealed how several attorneys retained by Doubleday closely monitored and vetted entire sections of the controversial text in 1964, demanding numerous name changes, the reworking and deletion of blocks of paragraphs, and so forth.

He therefore rewrote material to eliminate a number of negative statements about Jews in the book manuscript, with the explicit covert goal of 'getting them past Malcolm X,' without his coauthor's knowledge or consent.

"[65] Marable writes that Malcolm X was a "committed internationalist" and "black nationalist" at the end of his life, not an "integrationist", noting, "what I find in my own research is greater continuity than discontinuity".

"[47] Malcolm X had not yet formulated a cohesive Black ideology at the time of his assassination[71] and, Dyson writes, was "experiencing a radical shift" in his core "personal and political understandings".

[80] In 1990, Charles Solomon writes in the Los Angeles Times, "Unlike many '60s icons, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with its double message of anger and love, remains an inspiring document.

[83] Considering the literary impact of Malcolm X's Autobiography, we may note the tremendous influence of the book, as well as its subject generally, on the development of the Black Arts Movement.

Indeed, it was the day after Malcolm's assassination that the poet and playwright, Amiri Baraka, established the Black Arts Repertory Theater, which would serve to catalyze the aesthetic progression of the movement.

[84] Writers and thinkers associated with the Black Arts movement found in the Autobiography an aesthetic embodiment of his profoundly influential qualities, namely, "the vibrancy of his public voice, the clarity of his analyses of oppression's hidden history and inner logic, the fearlessness of his opposition to white supremacy, and the unconstrained ardor of his advocacy for revolution 'by any means necessary.

'"[85] bell hooks writes "When I was a young college student in the early seventies, the book I read which revolutionized my thinking about race and politics was The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

[87]Max Elbaum concurs, writing that "The Autobiography of Malcolm X was without question the single most widely read and influential book among young people of all racial backgrounds who went to their first demonstration sometime between 1965 and 1968.

[55][91] Since The Autobiography of Malcolm X has sold millions of copies,[92] Marable described Doubleday's choice as the "most disastrous decision in corporate publishing history".

[92] The book experienced increased readership and returned to the best-seller list in the 1990s, helped in part by the publicity surrounding Spike Lee's 1992 film Malcolm X.

[55] The manuscripts included three "missing chapters", titled "The Negro", "The End of Christianity", and "Twenty Million Black Muslims", that were omitted from the original text.