Biography of Alex Haley

Alex Haley (1921-1992) is the celebrated author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976). By April 1977 almost two million hardcover copies of the book had been sold and 130 million people had seen all or part of the eight-episode television series. Roots is thus considered by many critics a classic in African-American literature and culture.

Haley, who was born in Ithaca, New York, and raised in the small town of Henning, Tennessee, became interested in his ancestry while listening to colorful stories told by his family. One story in particular, about an African ancestor who refused to be called by his slave name "Toby" and declared instead that his name was "Kintay," impressed Haley deeply. Young Haley was so fascinated by this account that he later spent twelve years researching and documenting the life of "Kunta Kinte," the character in his famous Roots. School records indicate that Haley was not an exceptional student. At the age of eighteen he joined the U.S. Coast Guard and began a twenty-year career in the service. He practiced his writing, at first only to alleviate boredom on the ship, and soon found himself composing love letters for his shipmates to send home to their wives and girlfriends. He wrote serious pieces as well and submitted them to various magazines.

Upon retiring from the Coast Guard, Haley decided to become a full-time writer and journalist. His first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), which he cowrote with Malcolm X, was widely acclaimed upon its publication. The work sold over five million copies and launched Haley's writing career. Malcolm X was at first reluctant to work with Haley. He later told the writer: "I don't completely trust anyone ... you I trust about twenty-five percent." Critics praised Haley for sensitively handling Malcolm X's volatile life, and the book quickly became required reading in many schools. Two weeks after The Autobiography of Malcolm X was completed, Haley began work on his next project, Roots. The tale chronicles the life of Kunta Kinte, a proud African who is kidnapped from his village in West Africa, forced to endure the middle passage--the brutal shipment of Africans to be sold in the Americas--on the slave ship Lord Ligonier, and made a slave on the Waller plantation in the United States. To authenticate Kunta's life and that of Kunta's grandson, Chicken George, Haley visited archives, libraries, and research repositories on three continents. He even reenacted Kunta's experience on the Lord Ligonier. "[Haley] somehow scourged up some money and flew to Liberia where he booked passage on the first U. S. bound ship," an Ebony interviewer related. "Once at sea, he spent the night lying on a board in the hold of the ship, stripped to his underwear to get a rough idea of what his African ancestor might have experienced."

Although critics generally lauded Roots, they seemed unsure whether to treat the work as a novel or as a historical account. While the narrative is based on factual events, the dialogue, thoughts, and emotions of the characters are fictionalized. Haley himself described the book as "faction," a mixture of fact and fiction. Most critics concurred and evaluated Roots as a blend of history and entertainment. Despite the fictional characterizations, Willie Lee Rose suggested in the New York Review of Books that Kunta Kinte's parents Omoro and Binte "could possibly become the African proto-parents of millions of Americans who are going to admire their dignity and grace." Newsweek applauded Haley's decision to fictionalize: "Instead of writing a scholarly monograph of little social impact, Haley has written a blockbuster in the best sense--a book that is bold in concept and ardent in execution, one that will reach millions of people and alter the way we see ourselves."

Some voiced concern, however--especially at the time of the television series--that racial tension in America would be aggravated by Roots. While Time did report several incidents of racial violence following the telecast, it commented that "most observers thought that in the long term, Roots would improve race relations, particularly because of the televised version's profound impact on whites.... A broad consensus seemed to be emerging that Roots would spur black identity, and hence black pride, and eventually pay important dividends." Some black leaders viewed Roots "as the most important civil rights event since the 1965 march on Selma," according to Time. Vernon Jordan, executive director of the National Urban League, called it "the single most spectacular educational experience in race relations in America." Speaking of the appeal of Roots among blacks, Haley added: "The blacks who are buying books are not buying them to go out and fight someone, but because they want to know who they are.... [The] book has touched a strong, subliminal chord."

For months after the publication of Roots in October 1976, Haley signed at least five hundred copies of the book daily, spoke to an average of six thousand people a day, and traveled round trip coast-to-coast at least once a week. Scarcely two years later, Roots had already won 271 awards, and its television adaptation had been nominated for a recordbreaking thirty-seven Emmys. Over eight million copies of the book were in print, and the text was translated into twenty-six languages. In addition to fame and fortune, Roots also brought Haley controversy. In 1977 two published authors, Margaret Walker and Harold Courlander, alleged separately that Haley plagiarized their work in Roots. Charges brought by Walker were later dropped, but Haley admitted that he unknowingly lifted three paragraphs from Courlander's The African (1968). A settlement was reached whereby Haley paid Courlander $500,000. The same year other accusations also arose. Mark Ottaway in The Sunday Times questioned Haley's research methods and the credibility of his informants, accusing Haley of "bending" data to fit his objectives. Gary B. and Elizabeth Shown Mills also challenged some of Haley's assertions. Writing in 1981 in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, they cited evidence that there was indeed a slave named Toby living on the Waller plantation. He was there, however, at least five years before the arrival of the Lord Ligonier, supposedly with Kunta on board.

Haley's supporters maintain that Haley never claimed Roots as fact or history. And even in the presence of controversy, the public image of Roots appears not to have suffered. It is still widely read in schools, and many college and university history and literature programs consider it an essential part of their curriculum. According to Haley himself, Roots is important not for its names and dates but as a reflection of human nature: "Roots is all of our stories.... It's just a matter of filling in the blanks ... ; when you start talking about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth." Indeed, Haley's admirers contend, Roots remains a great book because it is the universal story of humankind's own search for its identity.

Alex Haley's reputation in the literary world rests upon his much acclaimed historical novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Haley's tracing of his African ancestry to the Mandinka tribe in a tiny village in Juffure of the Gambia region of West Africa, spawned one of the most ambitious television productions ever undertaken and inspired a generation of ancestry-seeking Americans. Eleven years prior to the appearance of Roots, Haley had gained recognition for writing Malcolm X's "as-told-to" autobiography, which was released shortly after the charismatic leader was gunned down while giving a speech in New York. After Spike Lee released the movie Malcolm X in 1992, bookstore owners had difficulty keeping the autobiography in stock.

Haley was born in 1921 in Ithaca, New York, and reared in the small town of Henning, Tennessee. He was the eldest of three sons born to Bertha George Palmer and Simon Alexander Haley; and when he was born, both his parents were in their first year of graduate school--his mother at the Ithaca Conservatory of Music, and his father at Cornell University. After finishing school, his parents took young Alex to Henning, where he grew up under the influence of his grandmother and aunts Viney, Mathilda, and Liz, who perpetuated stories about his African ancestor Kunte Kinte. These stories became the impetus for Roots, with which hundreds of thousands of African Americans would identify.

Although it took Haley twelve years to research and write Roots, success quickly followed its publication. Recipient of numerous awards, including a citation from the judges of the 1977 National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prizes, the book is recognized as one of the most successful bestsellers in American publishing history, having sold millions of copies worldwide in 37 languages. Combined with the impact of the televised miniseries, Roots has become a "literary-television phenomenon" and a "sociological event," according to Time. By April, 1977, almost two million people had seen all or part of the first eight-episode series; and seven of those eight episodes ranked among the top ten shows in TV ratings, attaining an average of 66 percent of audience share.

Although critics generally lauded Haley for his accomplishment, they seemed unsure whether to treat Roots as a novel or as a historical account. While it is based on factual events, the dialogue, thoughts, and emotions of the characters are fictionalized. Haley himself described the book as "faction," a mixture of fact and fiction. Most critics concurred and evaluated Roots as a blend of history and entertainment. And despite the fictional characterizations, Willie Lee Rose suggested in the New York Review of Books that Kunta Kinte's parents Omoro and Binte "could possibly become the African proto-parents of millions of Americans who are going to admire their dignity and grace." Newsweek found that Haley's decision to fictionalize was the right approach: "Instead of writing a scholarly monograph of little social impact, Haley has written a blockbuster in the best sense--a book that is bold in concept and ardent in execution, one that will reach millions of people and alter the way we see ourselves."

Some concern was voiced, especially at the time of the first television series, that racial tension in America would be aggravated by Roots. But while Time reported several incidents of racial violence following the telecast, it commented that "most observers thought that in the long term, Roots would improve race relations, particularly because of the televised version's profound impact on whites.... A broad consensus seemed to be emerging that Roots would spur black identity, and hence black pride, and eventually pay important dividends." Some black leaders viewed Roots "as the most important civil rights event since the 1965 march on Selma," according to Time. Vernon Jordan, executive director of the National Urban League, called it "the single most spectacular educational experience in race relations in America."

Haley has heard only positive comments from both blacks and whites. He told William Marmon in a Time interview: "The blacks who are buying books are not buying them to go out and fight someone, but because they want to know who they are. Roots is all of our stories. It's the same for me or any black. It's just a matter of filling in the blanks--which person, living in which village, going on what ship across the same ocean, slavery, emancipation, the struggle for freedom.... The white response is more complicated. But when you start talking about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth. We all have it; it's a great equalizer.... I think the book has touched a strong, subliminal chord."

But there was also concern, according to Time, that "breast-beating about the past may turn into a kind of escapism, distracting attention from the present. Only if Roots turns the anger at yesterday's slavery into anger at today's ghetto will it really matter." And James Baldwin wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "Rootsis a study of continuities, of consequences, of how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one--the action of love, or the effect of the absence of love, in time. It suggests, with great power, how each of us, however unconsciously, can't but be the vehicle of the history which has produced us. Well, we can perish in this vehicle, children, or we can move on up the road."

For months after the publication of Roots in October, 1976, Haley signed at least five hundred books daily, spoke to an average of six thousand people a day, and traveled round trip coast-to-coast at least once a week, according to People. Stardom took its toll on Haley. New Times reported that on a trip to his ancestral village in Africa, Haley complained: "You'll find that people who celebrate you will kill you. They forget you are blood and flesh and bone. I have had days and weeks and months of schedules where everything from my breakfast to my last waking moment was planned for me.... Someone has you by the arm and is moving you from room to room. Then people grab at you. You're actually pummeled--hit with books--and you ask yourself, My God, what is this?"

Roots was so successful that ABC produced a sequel, Roots: The Next Generations, a $16.6-million production that ran for 14 hours. The story line of Roots II, as it was called, begins in 1882, twelve years after the end of the Roots I, and it concludes in 1967. During the 85-year span, Haley's family is depicted against the backdrop of the Ku Klux Klan, world wars, race riots, and the Great Depression; and the commonalities between black and white middle-class life are dramatized as well.

Haley also researched his paternal heritage; and in 1993, CBS aired a three-episode miniseries, Queen, about his paternal great-grandmother, Queen, the daughter of a mulatto slave girl and a white slave owner. Writing in the New York Times, John J. O'Connor noted that although "the scope is considerably more limited ... the sense of unfolding history, familial and national, is still compelling." Accusations surfaced about the historical accuracy of Queen, though, which recalled the charges of plagiarism and authenticity leveled at Roots by the author of The Africans, Harold Courtlander, who was subsequently paid $650,000 in an out-of-court settlement. Critics questioned whether a romance had actually existed between Queen and her slave-owning master. According to Melinda Henneberger in the New York Times, the tapes left by Haley did not mention a romance between his paternal great-grandparents, and David Stevens, who worked with Haley's research and outline, recalled Haley's intent to soften the relationship. Producer Mark Wolper indicated that "Haley had become convinced by his later inquiries ... that his great-grandparents had actually been in love," wrote Henneberger, adding that "several scholars, all of whom said they would never contradict Haley's research into his own family, added that consensual, lifelong relationships between slaves and owners were exceedingly rare." Esther B. Fein noted in the New York Times that the book was published as a novel "partly because Mr. Haley could not verify all the family folklore that inspired it and died before the project was completed."

In 1985, Haley was working on a novel set in the Appalachian culture that he had researched extensively. The novel was centered around the relationships among a mountain father, son, and grandson. Because this book was not about blacks but primarily about whites, Haley said of the project, "I think one of the most fascinating things you can do after you learn about your own people is to study something about the history and culture of other people." Haley also planned to write a book detailing the life of Madame C. J. Walker and her daughter A'Lelia. Haley had signed a three-book contract with Ballantine for its new multicultural publishing program, for which his first title was to be a comprehensive history of his hometown--Henning. Those who knew Haley well say his research on Henning predated the writing of Roots. Haley was buried on the grounds of his Henning homestead, but in 1992, his estate auctioned off virtually all his possessions to pay a $1.5 million debt.

Associated Works

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of Alex Haley (1924-1992)
• At the time of Haley's birth:
• Calvin Coolidge was elected president of the United States
• Surrealist Manifesto was promulgated in Paris
• V.I. Lenin died, age 53, of sclerosis; Josef Stalin took power
• The Ottoman Dynasty, founded in 1290, came to an end
• Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a young boy; Clarence Darrow successfully defended them against the death penalty
• At the time of Haley's death:
• George Bush was president of the United States
• Serbian troops entered Bosnia and besieged Sarajevo
• Bill Clinton was elected president of the United States
• South African whites voted to end minority rule
• Prince Charles and Lady Diana formally separated
• The times:
• 1936-1939: Spanish Civil War
• 1939-1945: World War II
• 1950-1953: Korean War
• 1960-Present: Post Modernist Period of American literature
• 1957-1975: Vietnam War
• 1973: Israeli-Arab War
• 1982: Falkland War
• 1983: American invasion of Grenada
• 1991: War against Iraq
• 1992--1996: Civil war in Bosnia
• Haley's contemporaries:
• Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) United States Supreme Court Justice
• Ronald Reagan (1911-) American president
• Menachem Begin (1913-1992) Prime minister of Israel
• William S. Burroughs (1914-) American Beat writer
• Norman Mailer (1923-) American writer
• Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) American writer
• B.B. King (1925-) American blues musician
• Gore Vidal (1925-) American writer
• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929-1994) American first lady
• John Updike (1932-) American writer
• Selected world events:
• 1927: The Free Library Building of Philadelphia was completed
• 1936: Penguin Books Ltd. began a paperback book publishing revolution
• 1947: The NAACP decided to fight for integration in the schools
• 1954: The United States Supreme Court ruled "separate but equal" unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education
• 1960: To Kill a Mocking Bird, Harper Lee's novel about a racially motivated trial, was published
• 1974: World oil prices escalated
• 1984: South Africa declared a state of emergency giving police and military complete power over blacks
• 1988: Toni Morrison received the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved

Further Reading

• The Black Press U.S.A., Iowa State University Press, 1990.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 8, 1978, Volume 12, 1980.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 38: Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, Gale, 1985.
• Black Collegian, September/October, 1985.
• Christianity Today, May 6, 1977.
• Ebony, April, 1977.
• Forbes, February 15, 1977.