It’s the birthday of American writer Alex Haley, born in Ithaca, New York, in 1921. He was a journalist and freelance writer and went to work doing interviews for Playboy magazine. He interviewed Muhammad Ali, Miles Davis, Johnny Carson, and Malcolm X.
The interview with Malcolm X would turn into Haley’s first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), which chronicled Malcolm’s rise to national spokesman for The Nation of Islam. It is one of the most-read books in the world.
Inspired by the oral histories of his relatives, who traced his lineage back seven generations to the slave era, Haley began researching his genealogy in the late 1960s. It took him more than 10 years of international travel, interviews with tribal members in Gambia, and endless writing on long yellow legal tablets, but in 1976, his book, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, was published.
It was a best-seller and was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 1977. The book was adapted into a television miniseries, and more than 130 million people watched it.
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