Alex Haley was once a commanding figure in American popular culture, but his name is now in eclipse. He sold six million copies each of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and “Roots,” his epic of slavery and black survival in America. Eighty million people watched individual episodes of the 1977 TV miniseries of the book he called “a saga.” But his career ended in charges that “Roots” was both fraudulent and plagiarized—a neat trick—and his reputation never recovered.
More than two decades after his death at 70 in 1992, Haley is the subject of a sympathetic and mostly clear-eyed biography by Robert J. Norrell, a professor at the University of Tennessee. The book doesn’t dispel the cloud hanging over Haley, but it does portray him as an earnest, striving writer who overpaid his dues as an African-American freelancer desperate to break into the big time. In the darkest days, he papered a wall of his basement flat with rejection letters, the most encouraging a postcard from an editor that said: “Nice try.”
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Two authors sued Haley for plagiarism of their similar books, and he had to cough up more than $2.5 million in today’s money to settle one case and pay the lawyers. Then the academics piled on—establishing that Haley’s vaunted documentary and genealogical research was riddled with errors and contradicted his claims.You'll want to read the entire thing. At least Barack Obama admitted up front that his autobiography is fully part fiction.
Haley staged a dignified retreat. “I was just trying to give my people a myth to live by,” he took to saying. He could have avoided all the grief if he and his publishers had simply labeled the book what it was—a historical novel valid in its essential narrative but informed by the imagination. But then, of course, “Roots” would never have achieved the mythic stature it still enjoys today.
