Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley (1976) sold a million copies during its first year in print, spent 22 weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and inspired the miniseries Roots, watched by a record 130 million people. Not since Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 had a work of literature sparked such a cultural awakening in American race relations. The struggles of Kunta Kinte and his family over generations of enslavement, as depicted in Haley's novel but especially in graphic fashion through the television adaptation, transformed the horrors of slavery from distant historical memory to omnipresent national shame.
Alex Haley (1921-1992) also wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), based on several years of interviews with the civil rights leader. A second miniseries, Roots: The Next Generations (1979), was based on the last seven chapters of Haley's novel. Haley was criticized for inaccurately portraying his own genealogy and for plagiarizing parts of Harold Courlander's The African. Controversies aside, Roots remains an important work worth revisiting. --Tobias Mutter