Many reviewers of The Autobiography of Malcolm X agree about the power and desire evident in the book. Truman Nelson, writing in the Nation soon after the release of the book, lauds it for its "dead-level honesty, its passion, its exalted purpose." And, according to Warner Berthoff in New Literary History, the way Malcolm X blends "his own life story with the full collective history of his milieu. . . gives Malcolm's testimony its strength and large authority."

Malcolm X's conversion to Islam and how that is relayed in the book is a commonly addressed subject in both the book's early and recent reviews. I. F. Stone, in an article for the New York Review of Books soon after the book's publication, notes,' 'To understand Malcolm's experience, one must go to the literature of conversion," such as William James' s classic examination Varieties of Religious Experience. Berthoff...