There’s a sort of reverence when Winter discusses Elvis’ decision “to just utterly transform himself from a shy blond-haired poor boy something that would, at the very least, turn heads, get people’s attention, be totally different from everything else in his environment.”īeautifully illustrated by Chris Sickels, with whom Winter has collaborated on two other books, Elvis Is King! is a standout piece of visual art in and of itself. In his early 20s, Winter too decided to shake loose his identity as a “nerd” and an “outcast” and rebrand himself as someone more outgoing.

“The idea that you can overcome your shyness, your stage fright, your self-consciousness through, ironically, being as outrageous as possible is something I understand to my core,” he says. For Winter, the genesis of Elvis Presley resonated on a very personal level. A scrawny, shy, blond boy from a poor family in the Midwest, his is truly a rags-to-riches story. Odds are, when you think of Elvis, you think of him with his greased-up hair, swiveling hips, and that instantly recognizable voice, but when Elvis was born, such a fate would have seemed nearly impossible. “What he turned his life into-that was something close to a miracle.” “His life began in such pain, such sorrow, such limitation,” he explains. While his editor steered him away from such an approach, he says that, in the end, Elvis Is King! retains some of his original allusions to the religiouslike trajectory of the star’s life, albeit in a tighter, more serious fashion.

“I originally conceived of this book as a modern saint’s story,” Winter says, citing his fascination with the numerous cults around the icon, some of which are predicated on a very real sense of Elvis as holy. That he should set his sights on the King, Elvis Presley, is no surprise-what’s surprising is how he first envisioned the book.

The prolific author of more than 30 nonfiction picture books, he’s explored the likes of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Frida Kahlo, Willie Mays, and, in his New York Times bestseller Barack, Barack Obama. Jonah Winter is no stranger to larger-than-life characters.

Elvis Is King! by Jonah Winter