Alex Haley

Alexander Palmer Haley (Ithaca, New York, 1921 - August 11, Seattle (Washington), February 10, 1992) was an American writer and journalist. His most important works areThe Autobiography of Malcolm X, of which he was the ghostwriter, and Roots: The Saga of an American Family, in which he told the oral history of his surviving family.

Haley grew up in the South of the United States into a family of African, Irish and Cherokee descent was. In 1939 he took service with the coast guard, where he would stay for 20 years. After the Second World War he became a journalist at the coast guard, and after his retirement in 1959 he worked for reader's Digest.

For Playboy Magazine interview, he made the first ever in that journal in september 1962, with jazz legend Miles Davis. Davis spoke in this interview about his experiences and thoughts on racism. Haley later interviewed Dr. Martin Luther King for the same sheet, the longest interview that Reverend King ever gave off. Haley was responsible for several startling other interviews for Playboy Magazine, including that with the American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell. Rockwell wanted Haley only speak after it had assured him in a phone call not to be Jewish . During the call, Rockwell had a loaded gun on the table for them, that fact by Haley with professionalism and calm was ignored. In the interview with Cassius Clay to Clay for the first time reported his name will turn into Muhammad Ali.

The interview with Malcolm X in 1963 would lead to cooperation in which Haley would write the autobiography of Malcolm X. The book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published in 1965, and would later be named by Time Magazine as one of the ten most important books of the twentieth century.

In 1976 published Haley Roots: The Saga of an American Family, as issued in the Dutch Roots, we blacks, based on the history of his own family, which was teruggetraceerd to the Mandinka Kunta Kinte in Gambia in 1767 by slave traders was caught and was sold into slavery in America. The book had ten years of preparation and research cost, where Haley had been repeatedly in the Gambia. He had a Player of the orally transmitted history of Kunta Kinte learned, after which he could connect this to his own family history. Roots was in 37 languages translated, won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a miniseries. For Americans of African descent was Roots proof that there was more information on their origin in many cases than previously assumed.

In 1978 was Haley accused of plagiarism when writing Roots. After a lawsuit it came to a settlement, in which Haley paid 650,000 dollars to Harold Courlander, from whose book he had taken over The African large pieces. In 1988 followed a second indictment of Margaret Walker who claimed that Haley the copyright of her book had violated Jubilee . However, her claim was rejected by the Court.

In the late 1980s began Haley to working out the genealogy of another branch of his family, those of his grandmother Queen. After Haleys death was finished the book by David Stevens and Alex Haley's Queenas issued. This book was made into a film In 1993 .

Haleys work was not always without controversy. Both in Roots and in the autobiography of Malcolm X, he would have freely mixed fact and fiction. Haley admitted that Roots for a large part was fiction, but the family facts including his parentage of Kunta Kinte, via his daughter Kizzy and her son George, his son Tom and his daughter Cynthia he claimed as correct. Well-known genealogists, however, later showed that there were too many inaccuracies in the story, so would Toby (slave name of Kunta Kinte) long before the birth of Kizzy are deceased. It was also suggested that the griot who in Gambia Haleys story had confirmed was coached to such a story to tell. Nevertheless, Roots an impressive story about America's history of slavery.