Roots: The Saga of an American Family

Roots is a 1976 historical fiction novel by Alex Haley. Haley served in the United States Coast Guard during World War II and as a military journalist after the war. Prior to writing Roots, Haley interviewed famous Black Americans and ghostwrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which has remained a bestselling work since its publication in 1965. In Roots, Haley combines his journalistic experience with Black America and his family’s oral history, bolstered with research on real-world events and people, including his family members. As historical fiction, the novel is not a faithful account of events of the past, but a dramatization of those events. Nonetheless, Haley produces a story of struggle, persistence, and achievement across seven generations of his own family, exploring The Brutality of the Slave Trade and Its Enduring Legacy, The Crossroads Between Oral and Written History, and Black and Familial Identity in the Wake of the Slave Trade, which generated a significant interest in genealogical research, African culture and heritage, and the possibility of creating similar family histories for other Black American families.

Haley received the Pulitzer Prize for Roots in 1977, as well as the Springarn Medal, awarded by the NAACP.