Book fine, dust jacket with a little bit of edgewear and a few small spots of flaking. Thick octavo, half-cloth, original dust jacket. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1976. He skyrocketed to fame after being asked by Playboy to conduct an interview with Miles Davis. Alex Haley worked 16-hour days for 2,000 per year for weeks at a time, eating canned sardines and working until exhaustion set in. It stimulated interest and pride in the African-American experience.' ( American National Biography). A fictionalized account of Haley’s own family’s history is also featured in Haley’s second novel, Roots. Broadcast by ABC in January and February 1977, it was seen, in whole or in part, by 130 million people. An interview with Malcolm X led to an offer to ghost write the controversial civil rights leader’s memoirs, which Haley finished just weeks before Malcolm’s assassination. A bestselling book that won a Pulitzer Prize, Roots had even greater impact when it was made into a gripping television miniseries. A historical novel that invited acceptance as a work of history, it told the story of the family's origins in West Africa, its experience in slavery, and its subsequent history. Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) finally appeared in the bicentennial year to great fanfare. In 1972 Haley founded and became the president of the Kinte Foundation of Washington, D.C., which sought to encourage research in African-American history and genealogy. His research trips across the South took him to Gambia, West Africa, where a griot identified an ancestor as Kunte Kinte. Backed by a contract from Doubleday, Haley began serious work on a book that was initially to be called Before This Anger. 'Recalling stories recounted to him by his grandmother twenty-five years earlier, had begun research on his family's history as early as 1961. Forcing forth from Binta's strong young body, he was black as she was, flecked and slippery with Binta's blood, and he was bawling.'įIRST EDITON, SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY HALEY on front free endpaper: '11/20/76 To Linda Willson- very best to your family from the family of Kunta Kinte! Alex Haley'.

'Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.

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