Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr.
Published 1963 · 24 pages · 7,000 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Politics & Society
How hard is Letter from Birmingham Jail to read?
Letter from Birmingham Jail scores 46 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
- Theological and philosophical references. Eloquent but accessible.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Philosophical argument about justice grounded in specific struggle.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Compressed. Seven thousand words of sustained argument.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Direct argument with rhetorical flourishes.
- Symbolic density: 25 out of 100
- Birmingham as symbol of segregation. Rich biblical and philosophical allusion.
- Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
- Devastating irony directed at 'white moderates.'
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- King is clear about what justice requires.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Systematic response to each criticism. Well-organized.
How Letter from Birmingham Jail is regarded
Letter from Birmingham Jail holds a literary regard score of 85 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.