Alex Haley
Alex Palmer Haley (August 11, 1921 - February 10, 1992) was an African American US Coast Guardsman who was the Chief Journalist for the service before retiring to become a senior editor for Reader's Digest. He wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X in 1965 and is probably best known for his book Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a fictionalized account of his family's history, starting with the story of Kunta Kinte, kidnapped in Gambia in 1767 to be sold as a slave in the United States. Roots won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to become a popular television miniseries. In the late 1980s, he began working on a second historical novel of another branch of his family, traced through his grandmother Queen - the daughter of a black slave woman and her white master. Haley died before he could complete the story; at his request, it was finished by David Stevens and was published as Alex Haley's Queen. It was subsequently made into a movie in 1993.
Born in Ithaca, New York, Haley grew up in the Southern U.S. and served in the Coast Guard from 1939 to 1959, starting as a mess attendant, 3rd class; during this time he started writing short stories and articles. He researched Roots for 12 years; the Roots TV series adaptation aired in 1977. The same year, Haley won a Pulitzer Prize for the book and the Spingarn Medal as well.
The book and film were both successful, evidently striking a chord in the American psyche and reaching record-breaking 130 million viewers when it was serialized on television. Roots emphasized that African Americans also have a long history and that not all of that history is lost, as many believed. Its popularity sparked an increased public interest in genealogy, as well.
External links
- Biography (http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ahaley.htm)
- The Kunta Kinte - Alex Haley Foundation (http://www.kintehaley.org/)
- Coast Guard cutter (http://www.uscg.mil/pacarea/haley/) named after Alex Haley
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