Alex Haley Biography and List of Works

American biographer, scriptwriter, author who became famous with the publication of the novel ROOTS, which traces his ancestry back to Africa and covers seven American generations as they are taken slaves to the United States. The book was adapted to television series, and woke up an interest in genealogy, particularly among African-Americans.

Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York. His father was a teacher of agriculture. The family moved to the small town of Henning, Tennessee, when Alex Haley was an infant. In Henning Haley heard stories from his maternal grandmother, Cynthia Palmer, who traced the family genealogy to Haley's great-great-great-great-grandfather, who was an African, called "Kin-tay" and brought by slave-ship to America.

Haley did not excel at school or university. During WW II Haley enlisted in the Coast Guard as a mess boy. He started to write adventure stories to stave off the boredom, and getting a new rating - Chief Journalist. After twenty years of service, Haley left the Coast Guard in 1959 to become a full-time writer. Following the years of poverty Haley produced THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X, his first major work. It appeared in 1965 and had immense effect on the black power movement in the United States. From conversations with the spokesman for the Nation of Islam (Black Muslim) movement, the author built an account of the life of Malcolm X in his own words. Malcolm's belief that he would not live to see the book proved correct: he was shot to death shortly before it went to press.

In 1965 Haley stumbled upon the names of his maternal great-grandparents, when he was going through post-Civil War records in National Archives in Washington, D.C. This resulted to odyssey that took 11 years and which is now part of literature history. On basis of family tradition and research Haley travelled by safari to the village of Juffure, to trace his own ancestor and to meet with a native griot, an oral historian, who could name Haley's own ancestor Kunta Kinte.

When Roots appeared in 1976 it gained critical and popular success, although the truth and originality of the book faced criticism. James Baldwin considered in his New York Times review, that Roots suggest how each of us are vehicle of the history which have produced us. On the other side - representing a minority opinion - Michael Arled viewed the book and television series as Haley's own fantasies about Going Home. It was also claimed that the griot in Juffure was a well-known trickster and told Haley just what he wanted to hear. However, Haley donated money to the village for a new mosque. He had also founded in the early 1970s with his brothers the Kinte Foundation to collection and preservation of African-American genealogy records.

In 1977 Roots won the National Book Award and a special Pulitzer Prize. The book sold in one-year more than million copies. It challenged the view of black history as explored in such works as Stanley M. Elkin's Slavery (1959). Slaves did not give up all their ties to African culture, but humour, songs, words and folk beliefs survived. The book showed that the oppressed never became docile: Kunta Kinte suffered amputation of a foot for his repeated attempts to run away. He valued his heritage so much that he never accepted the ways of his slave masters and insisted on being called by his real name Kinte, not by his slave name Toby.

Haley himself commented that the book was not so much history as a study of mythmaking. "What Roots gets at in whatever form, is that it touches the pulse of how alike we human beings are when you get down to the bottom, beneath these man-imposed differences."

Among Haley's later literary projects were the history of the town of Henning and a biography of Frank Wills, the security guard who discovered the Watergate break-in. In television series Palmerstown, USA (1980) Haley collaborated with producer Norman Lear. The series was based on author's boyhood experiences in Henning. A DIFFERENT KIND OF CHRISTMAS (1988) was a short novella in which the son of slaveholding Southern parents slowly realizes that the practice of slavery is wrong. QUEEN (1993), a strong epic novel, examined the roots of his father's side of the family. The book was completed by David Stevens. Haley died on February 10, 1992.

Haley's Playboy interviews with Malcolm X, Johnny Carson, Martin Luther King, Miles Davis, and others, written in the years between 1962 and 1992, have been published in an anthology. MAMA FLORA'S FAMILY (1998), based on Haley's writings and written by David Stevens, is a story of Flora, a black girl born to a sharecropping family in Mississippi. Flora's life is followed from her childhood in the pre World War I period to the present. The Civil Rights-Black Power paradigm, that caused disagreements in many black families, is one of the central themes of the book.

Roots: television miniseries, January 23 - January 30, 1977. - Roots attracted some 130 million viewers - the largest audience up to then. The idea of miniseries had not been used widely in the United States except on public television. ABC had in the 1975-76 success with Rich Man, Poor Man, which encouraged the network to finance additional miniseries, including Roots. The show was run on eight consecutive nights, an hour or two each night. During the time it played a heavy blizzard snowed up one third of America. Each episode was complete within itself, ending in positive, hopeful note, except the sixth and seventh. - Roots was produced by ABC, written by William Blinn, Ernest Kinoy, James Lee, and M. Charles Cohen, directed by David Greene, John Erman, Marvin J. Chomsky, Gilbert Moses, and starring Ed Asner, Chuck Connors, Carolyn Jones, O.J. Simpson, Ralph Waite, Lou Gossett, Lorne Greene, Robert Reed, LeVar Burton (as Kunta Kinte), Ben Veeren (as Chicken Geroge), Lynda Day George, Vic Morrow, Raymond St Jacques, Sandy Duncan, John Amos, Leslie Uggams, MacDonald Carey, George Hamilton, Ian MacShane, Richard Roundtree, Lloyd Bridges, Doug McClure, Burl Ives. - A second series, Roots: The Next Generations, was shown in 1979. It spanned the period from 1882 to the 1970s. The show ran in six 96 minutes episodes.

For further reading: American History, American Television, ed. by John E. O'Connor (1983); Alex Haley's Roots Revisited by Betty Winston Baye in Essense 22 (February, 1992); Alex Haley, ed, by Nathan I. Huggins (1993); Alex Haley & Malcolm X's the Autobiography of Malcolm X, ed. by Harold Bloom (1996)

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X, (1965)