Alex Palmer Haley’s two major works are milestones in the history of American literature. Both The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Roots helped African Americans understand themselves and their place in American history and society. By presenting an objective look at the darker side of that history and society, Haley’s works also helped white Americans understand the racial tragedy that had been long hidden. Both books had enormous international sales, and Roots has been translated into dozens of languages. The television dramatization of Roots in 1977 drew the highest viewing audience until that time; a popular miniseries sequel, Roots: The Next Generation, aired in 1979.

Haley’s personal odyssey was just as interesting as that of the African Americans whom he described in his books. Haley joined the Coast Guard in 1939 to see the world. At his father’s insistence, he had learned to type while in high school, and as a result he wrote letters for his shipmates to their girlfriends. He interviewed the sailors, writing the information he received on three-by-five cards and fashioning a letter specifically for each correspondent, thus unwittingly developing the research skills that later served him so well. He wrote every day for eight years, sending off hundreds of manuscripts, which were all rejected, before finally receiving his first letter of acceptance.

By 1959, when Haley retired from the Coast Guard, he had seen his work published in women’s romance magazines and men’s adventure magazines; he had also published pieces in The Atlantic Monthly and Reader’s Digest. Haley began a regular series of interviews for Playboy magazine, one of which was with black militant leader Malcolm X; this interview led to a new phase in Haley’s career.

When the Playboy interview appeared in 1963, most Americans knew Malcolm X as a spokesman for Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam (a religious group also known as the Black Muslims) and thought of him as a hatemonger. When a publisher asked Malcolm X for his autobiography, Malcolm decided instead to tell his story to Haley, who shaped the material into a book. Living under constant threat of death from various quarters, Malcolm told Haley that he did not think he would live to read the published autobiography. He did, however, read and approve the book in manuscript form before being assassinated in February, 1965.

Even before Haley completed his account of Malcolm’s life, he was putting his talents as a researcher to work on another project. As a child in Henning, Tennessee, Haley had listened to his grandmother and other relatives tell stories about “the African,” the earliest known member of their family. The African had told his daughter Kizzy that he had been taken from his home across the sea and that his name was Kunta Kinte. He had also taught his daughter the African words for things they encountered in their life as slaves on a plantation in Virginia, and Kizzy had passed the story on to her son, Chicken George, whose father was the white plantation master, Tom Lea. Chicken George passed the story to his descendants, among them Tom Murray, a North Carolina blacksmith whose daughter was Haley’s grandmother. This family saga was published in 1976 as Roots.

Although some critics faulted Haley for historical inaccuracies in Roots and for a popular style, even his severest critics admit that his writing has intense emotional power. For example, when Kizzy is sold to another family, never to be seen again, Kinte himself, who had endured so much, also disappears from Haley’s narrative. It is a masterful dramatic stroke, as the reader’s attention...