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Author profile

Alex Haley

American writer (1921-1992) who spent two decades in the Coast Guard before becoming a journalist. He is best known for Roots (1976), his saga of an African American family, and for co-writing The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

1 published book 0 published articles

About Alex Haley

Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1921 and grew up in the South. He joined the U.S. Coast Guard in 1939 as a cook, and he began writing during his service. By the time he retired in 1959 he had risen to chief journalist. As a freelancer he became known for the Playboy interviews, and his talk with Malcolm X for the magazine led to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published in 1965.

Haley wrote about African American lives and family memory, often as reportage that reads like narrative. His method was to listen: interview first, shape the story afterward. That habit shaped his major book. Roots follows one family from an African village to enslavement in America and then to freedom. Haley spent about ten years researching it on three continents. He called the result "faction", a blend of documented history and imagined detail.

Roots came out in 1976 and received a special Pulitzer Prize and a special National Book Award citation in 1977. The NAACP gave him its Spingarn Medal the same year. The ABC miniseries made from it aired in January 1977 and became one of the most watched programs in American television history. The book also drew criticism. Haley faced a plagiarism suit, and genealogists later disputed parts of his research into his ancestry. He died in Seattle in 1992. Queen, a companion story drawn from his father's side of the family, was finished by David Stevens and published in 1993.

Start with Roots. It is long, but it moves along, and the Kunta Kinte chapters in Gambia are the best way into Haley's storytelling. If you want his reporting, read The Autobiography of Malcolm X next.

Published books

Author

Roots: The Saga of an American Family

Alex Haley's Roots follows one family across roughly seven generations. It begins with Kunta Kinte, a young Mandinka man from the Gambian village of Juffure who is seized in 1767 and shipped to the Americas. It then follows his descendants through slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, to Haley's own family in twentieth-century Tennessee. Haley blended documented history, family oral tradition and invented scenes, a method he called "faction". Published in 1976, the book became a publishing phenomenon and the basis of a landmark 1977 television miniseries. It won special citations from the Pulitzer Prize board and the National Book Awards. It also changed how many Americans thought about slavery, African heritage and family history. Its research and its borrowings from other writers have been seriously disputed, so it is best read as both a cultural event and a contested work of historical fiction.

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