Roots

Alex Haley

Published by Doubleday, 1974

About this Item

Alex Haley is best known, of course, for his novel ROOTS (offered here). Haley s first fame came with his assignments to do the first set of the famous Playboy magazine s interviews with famous and/or important and/or interesting people. His first Playboy interview was with the great jazz legend Miles Davis. Haley s Playboy interview with Martin Luther King, Jr. turned out to be the longest interview that Dr. King ever granted to any publication. Haley was also responsible for interviews, among others, with George Lincoln Rockwell, at the time the American Nazi Party leader. He also interviewed Muhammad Ali, Melvin Belli, Sammy Davis, Jr., Jim Brown, Johnny Carson, Quincy Jones, and a number of other notables. Alex Haley s first book was THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X, which among other things, has been a consistent best-seller since its 1965 publication. In 1998, Time magazine name THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X one of the ten most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century. ROOTS was published in 1976. It was based on his family s history, beginning with the story of Kunta Kinte, who was captured in Africa and transported to Maryland where he was sold as a slave. ROOTS was eventually published in 37 languages. Haley won a Special Award for ROOTS in 1977 from the Pulitzer Board. Of course, ROOTS was also adapted into one of the most successful television mini-series of all time, supposedly reaching at least 130 million viewers. Although there has been some controversy (and an out-of-court settlement) with regard to some possible plagiarism issues with ROOTS, it remains clear that it remains one of the most influential books of the 20th century. From the dust jacket: . . . When he was a boy in Henning, Tennessee, Alex Haley s grandmother used to tell him stories about their family -- stories that went back to her grandparents, and their grandparents, down through the generations all the way to a man she called the African. She said he had lived across the ocean near what he called the Kamby Bolongo and had been out in the forest one day chopping wood to make a drum when he was set upon by four men, beaten, chained, and dragged aboard a slave ship bound for Colonial America . . . Still vividly remembering the stories after he grew up and became a writer, Haley began to search for documentation that might authenticate the narrative. It took ten years and a half a million miles of travel across three continents to find it, but finally, in an astonishing feat of genealogical detective work, he discovered not only the name of the African -- Kunta Kinte -- but the precise location of Juffure, the very village in The Gambia, West Africa, from which he was abducted in 1767 at the age of sixteen and taken on the Lord Ligonier to Maryland and sold to a Virginia planter . . . Haley has talked in Juffure with his own African sixth cousins. On September 29, 1967, he stood on the dock in Annapolis where his great-great-great-great-great grandfather was taken ashore on September 29, 1767. Now he has written the monumental two-century drama of Kunta Kinte and the six generations who came after him -- slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lumber mill workers and Pullman porters, lawyers and architects -- and one author . . . But Haley has done more than recapture the history of his own family. As the first Black American writer to trace his origins back to their roots, he has told the story of 25,000,000 Americans of African descent. He has rediscovered for an entire people a rich cultural heritage that slavery took away from them, along with their names and their identities. But ROOTS speaks, finally, not just to Blacks, or to whites, but to all peoples and all races everywhere, for the story it tells is one of the most eloquent testimonials ever written to the indomitibility of the human spirit . . . Alex Haley taught himself to write during a twenty-year career in the U.S. Coast Guard. After retiring in 1959 -- as its first Ch.

Seller Inventory # 750

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Roots
• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication Date: 1974
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: As New
• Weight: 3 pounds