Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Roots: The Saga of an American Family | 1976 |
| Queen: The Story of an American Family / Alex Haley’s Queen (With: David Stevens) | 1993 |
| Mama Flora’s Family (With: David Stevens) | 1998 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| A Different Kind of Christmas | 1988 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| The Autobiography of Malcolm X (With: Malcolm X) | 1965 |
| Alex Haley: The Playboy Interviews | 1993 |
About Alex Haley
Alex Haley (1921 to 1992) was an American writer best known for “Roots: The Saga of an American Family” (1976), a novel based on his own family history that follows Kunta Kinte, taken from The Gambia into slavery in 1767, and his descendants in the United States. His first book was “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (1965).
Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, on 11 August 1921, the eldest of three brothers, and spent part of his childhood in Henning, Tennessee. He attended Alcorn State University and Elizabeth City State College before withdrawing and enlisting in the United States Coast Guard in 1939. He taught himself to write stories while serving in the Pacific, transferred into journalism after the Second World War and became the Coast Guard’s first chief journalist. He retired from the service in 1959.
As a civilian he became a senior editor at Reader’s Digest and conducted the first Playboy interview, with Miles Davis, published in September 1962. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” grew out of more than 50 interviews held between 1963 and Malcolm X’s assassination in February 1965, and Haley added an epilogue describing the end of his subject’s life. The book won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1966.
“Roots” took twelve years of research, travel and writing. It spent forty-six weeks on the New York Times best seller list, twenty-two of them at number one, and won Haley a special Pulitzer Prize and the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1977. ABC’s television miniseries the same year drew 130 million viewers, a sequel, “Roots: The Next Generations”, aired in 1979, and History broadcast a remake in 2016. The book also brought a plagiarism suit from the novelist Harold Courlander, which Haley settled out of court in 1978 for $650,000, and genealogists have since disputed parts of his research.
His only other fiction published in his lifetime was “A Different Kind of Christmas” (1988), a short novel about a young Southerner drawn into the Underground Railroad. Haley died of a heart attack in Seattle on 10 February 1992 while working on a second family novel about his grandmother Queen. At his request the screenwriter David Stevens completed it, and “Queen: The Story of an American Family” appeared in 1993 alongside a CBS miniseries starring Halle Berry. Stevens also finished “Mama Flora’s Family”, published in 1998 and adapted for television the same year.