Haley, Alexander Murray Palmer

Impact on the world

Co-authored 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X' in 1965 based on extensive interviews conducted with Malcolm X in the final years of his life, producing what Time magazine later named one of the ten most important nonfiction books of the 20th century, before publishing 'Roots: The Saga of an American Family' in 1976, a multigenerational narrative tracing his maternal lineage back to an enslaved West African man named Kunta Kinte that won a Special Pulitzer Prize citation and sold more than eight million copies; its 1977 ABC television adaptation drew an estimated 130 to 140 million total viewers, more than half the entire U.S. population at the time, becoming, by Nielsen's measurement, the largest audience any television series had ever attracted, sparking a nationwide surge of interest in genealogy and Black history that directly shaped subsequent African American literature and academic study; the book and miniseries' legacy, however, became seriously complicated when a court found that 81 passages had been copied from novelist Harold Courlander's earlier book 'The African,' a claim Haley settled for a reported $650,000, and when other scholars and journalists separately challenged the historical accuracy of his claimed genealogical research, including whether the specific Gambian oral historian he described meeting had actually told him the story he reported.

Life & background

Born in Ithaca, New York in 1921 to a father pursuing graduate study in agriculture at Cornell and a mother who worked as a musician and teacher, Haley was raised largely by maternal relatives in Henning, Tennessee, who told him extensive family stories reaching back generations, material that directly shaped his later work. He left college after two years to join the U.S. Coast Guard, serving nearly two decades including service in the Pacific during World War II, and began writing during the tedium of long sea voyages before becoming the Coast Guard's first chief petty officer in the journalist rating upon his eventual retirement in 1959. After settling in New York to pursue journalism, he sold an interview with Miles Davis to Playboy magazine in 1962, helping launch the publication's celebrated interview format, before Playboy commissioned him the same year to interview Malcolm X, an assignment that evolved into 18 months of additional interviews and ultimately 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X,' published in 1965 just months after Malcolm X's assassination; Malcolm's widow, Betty Shabazz, reportedly trusted Haley more than any other journalist who had covered her husband. Haley spent a decade afterward researching and writing 'Roots,' traveling to the Gambian village of Juffure, where he said a tribal oral historian, or griot, recounted the story of his ancestor Kunta Kinte's 1767 capture and enslavement, though the book's publisher marketed it as straightforward nonfiction despite Haley's own later description of the work as 'faction,' a deliberate blend of fact and fiction. Following the book's extraordinary commercial and cultural success and the 1977 miniseries that followed, two separate plagiarism lawsuits emerged; Haley successfully defended himself against one claim while settling the other, brought by Harold Courlander, after evidence emerged that 81 passages in 'Roots' closely tracked passages from Courlander's own earlier novel, a outcome Haley attributed to research assistants providing him material without properly citing its origin. Despite the controversy, which led some literary scholars and academic anthologies to subsequently distance themselves from the book, Haley's combined body of work, particularly 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X,' remains widely regarded by historians as one of the most consequential works of 20th-century African American literature; he died of a heart attack in 1992 at age 70.

Sources

1. Washington Post (With MLK and Malcolm X revelations, Alex Haley's legacy takes new hit); Knoxville History Project (The Redemption of Alex Haley); Biography.com; EBSCO Research Starters; New World Encyclopedia; Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards