Alex Haley

Alex Haley was born in 1921 in Ithaca, New York, and grew up in Henning, Tennessee. After serving twenty years in the United States Coast Guard, where he began writing, Haley pursued a career in journalism, becoming one of the first prominent African American interviewers for Playboy magazine. His collaboration with Malcolm X, conducted through dozens of interviews in the early 1960s, produced one of the most important autobiographies in American literature. Haley went on to write Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which became a cultural phenomenon when adapted as a television miniseries in 1977. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by The Autobiography of Malcolm X.