- In full:
- Alexander Palmer Haley
- Died:
- February 10, 1992, Seattle, Washington (aged 70)
- Awards And Honors:
- Pulitzer Prize
- Notable Works:
- “Roots”
- “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
- Movement / Style:
- Black Arts movement
- Subjects Of Study:
- African Americans
- genealogy
Alex Haley
Who was Alex Haley?
What is Alex Haley’s most famous book?
Is Alex Haley’s Queen a true story?
Alex Haley (born August 11, 1921, Ithaca, New York, U.S.—died February 10, 1992, Seattle, Washington) was an American writer whose works of historical fiction and reportage depicted the struggles of African Americans. His best-known books are The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976).
Family and military service
Haley was the eldest son of Simon Haley, a college professor, and Bertha Palmer Haley, a grade school teacher. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to Henning, Tennessee (north of Memphis) to live with his maternal grandparents. As a child Haley heard many stories about his heritage from his grandmother and great-aunts. According to Haley, their tales traced the family’s lineage to an African ancestor who insisted on being called by his birth name of “Kin-tay” instead of “Toby,” the name given to him by his enslavers in America.
Haley was keenly aware of his family’s struggles, particularly those of his father, who came from a sharecropping family and had worked his way through high school and college, including as a railroad porter.
“I was a sailor, I was a cook and this and that, and it might be said I was bootstrapped up to being a writer, but the real bootstrapping was that which preceded me.” —Alex Haley, 1988
After Haley’s father completed his graduate studies in agriculture at Cornell University, he began teaching at what is now Alabama A&M University in Normal, Alabama, where the family relocated in 1929. Three years later Haley’s mother died.
Although his parents were teachers, Haley was an indifferent student, but he loved to read. He graduated from high school at age 15 and attended a teachers college before enlisting in the U.S. Coast Guard in 1939. Starting out as a mess attendant, he began writing to avoid boredom during voyages and was paid by his shipmates to ghostwrite their love letters. Eventually, Haley began publishing articles in the Reader’s Digest and other magazines. The Coast Guard promoted him to chief journalist, a rating that was created especially for him.
Playboy interviews and The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Haley retired from the military in 1959 and moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. Hoping to become a professional journalist, he wrote to several prominent Black writers seeking their advice. The only one who responded was James Baldwin, marking the beginning of a lasting friendship.
In 1962 Playboy magazine assigned Haley to interview jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, who was notorious for refusing to speak with white reporters. When their rambling but fascinating conversation appeared in Playboy’s September 1962 issue, it launched the publication’s celebrated interview series. Among the other figures Haley interviewed for Playboy were boxer Muhammad Ali, football star Jim Brown, actor and singer Sammy Davis, Jr., civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and talk show host Johnny Carson. In 1966 the magazine sent him to Virginia to interview American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell, who tried to intimidate the intrepid Haley by repeatedly using a racist slur. Haley’s response was unflinching: He told Rockwell that he had been called that word “many times…but this is the first time I’m being paid for it.”
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Haley’s first major work sprang from his Playboy series. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), based on his interviews with the Black Muslim leader, recounts Malcolm X’s life from his traumatic childhood to his years as a street hustler and drug dealer to his incarceration and conversion to Islam and his subsequent activism. Authoritative and widely read, the work is recognized as a classic of African American literature.
Roots
Haley’s greatest success, however, was a family saga that took him 12 years to complete. While researching it, he taught writing at Hamilton College in New York and likened his work-in-progress to a “Black Gone with the Wind,” in reference to Margaret Mitchell’s sweeping novel about the Civil War. Yet Haley’s book would dive much deeper into American history than Mitchell’s work had. In consultation with linguists, who identified the origins of words Haley had heard his grandmother and great-aunts use, he was able to trace his mother’s lineage back to the West African village of Juffure in The Gambia, where a griot (oral historian) described to him the mid-18th-century kidnapping of his ancestor, Kunta Kinte.
Haley published several articles about his research in various publications before Roots: The Saga of an American Family appeared in book form in August 1976. Covering seven American generations, from the enslavement of Kunta Kinte to Haley’s parents and the author’s own genealogical quest, the work was a massive bestseller.
Yet the book attracted criticism from historians who said it contained inaccuracies, especially regarding its African section. Additionally, it was revealed that the griot Haley consulted in The Gambia was a fraud. For his part, Haley admitted at the end of his book that his saga was partly fictional. In an interview with the London Sunday Times in 1977, he said, “But in the end, I felt I could only write what I was told. Neither you nor I know exactly what happened. But I stand by Roots as a symbol of the fate of my people.”
Roots was also the subject of two plagiarism suits, one of which, involving poet Margaret Walker and her 1966 novel Jubilee, was dismissed. The other suit, brought by Harold Courlander, who claimed that Haley plagiarized passages of his 1967 novel The African, was settled out of court. Haley said that the similarities were unintentional and blamed a miscommunication with a research assistant who provided him with material that was not properly cited.
Roots was adapted as a television miniseries that became a seminal event in American culture. When the series was first broadcast in January 1977, it became one of the most popular shows in the history of American television and galvanized attention on African American issues and history. Audiences were so riveted by the story of Kunta Kinte (played by LeVar Burton) and his descendants that restaurants, bars, and theaters were virtually empty of customers as people stayed glued to their TV sets at home. That same year Haley won a special Pulitzer Prize. A successful sequel was first broadcast in February 1979 as Roots: The Next Generations. Another TV adaptation of the novel debuted in 2016.
Other projects and books
Roots spurred much interest in family history, and Haley created the Kinte Foundation (1972) in Washington, D.C., to store records that aid in tracing African American genealogy. (In 1995 the Kunta Kinte-Alex Haley Foundation, which has a similar mission, was established in Annapolis, Maryland, where Haley’s ancestor was originally brought by ship in 1767.)
In 1978 Haley’s boyhood home in Henning was restored and opened to the public. On the same grounds, the state later constructed the Alex Haley Museum and Interpretive Center (2010), which educates visitors in genealogical methodology.
The U.S. Coast Guard honored Haley’s memory in 1999 by naming one of its ships after him.
Haley was a popular lecturer and continued to publish in periodicals. He also wrote for film and television, including the screenplay for the blaxploitation movie Super Fly T.N.T. (1973) and the Depression-set TV series Palmerstown U.S.A. (1980–81), which he also created and produced. In 1988 he published A Different Kind of Christmas, a novella centering on the Underground Railroad.
Haley died of a heart attack at age 70. At the time he was working on a book about his father’s lineage. It was completed by David Stevens and published as Alex Haley’s Queen in 1993; the same year it was adapted into a miniseries. Mama Flora’s Family is a fictional family saga by Haley that was finished by Stevens and posthumously published in 1998.
