Roots: The Saga of an American Family

Author Bio: Alex Haley

Alex Haley (1921–1992) is the author of Roots, one of the most celebrated novels of the 1970s and a #1 New York Times bestseller. He had spent twenty years in the Coast Guard and worked for a range of magazines before becoming a ghostwriter for his first major book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He then spent years tracing his own family history and decided it went back to a single African man, Kunta Kinte, who was captured in Gambia and taken to the United States as a slave. That research led to his book Roots: The Saga of an American Family, published in 1976 to wide acclaim and the basis for a television series with a record 130 million viewers. He is credited with inspiring interest in genealogy among African Americans. He received the 1977 Spingarn Medal from the NAACP for his exhaustive research and literary skill combined in Roots. In 2002 the Republic of Korea (South Korea) posthumously awarded Haley its Korean War Service Medal.