alex haley roots the saga of an american family

Roots opened up the minds of Americans of all colors and faiths to one of the darkest and most painful parts of America’s past, and we continue to feel its reverberations today. It also won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

The book sold over one million copies in the first year, and the miniseries was watched by an astonishing 130 million people.

The last seven chapters of the novel were later adapted in the form of a second mini-series, Roots: The Next Generations, in 1979. The novel spent 46 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List, including 22 weeks in that list’s top spot. The release of the novel, combined with its hugely popular television adaptation, Roots (1977), led to a cultural sensation in the United States. Being very poor, she said, he was working at as many as four odd jobs at the time in order to stay in school, where he was studying agriculture. It portrays the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and follows his life and the lives of his alleged descendants in the U.S. On later visits, Bertha began to speak about a young man whom she had met in the college choir, his name, Simon Alexander Haley, and he was from a town named Savannah, Tennessee. The newborn baby, with a 'round brown face' is presented to his grandparents.Roots is a novel written by Alex Haley and published in 1976. We have experienced unspeakable suffering along with moments of joy and the heartbreak of four generations, when a six-week-old baby is born in 1921, nearly two centuries after the birth of Kunta Kinte. ALEX HALEY (1921-1992) is the author of Roots, one of the most celebrated novels of the 1970s. Based on these few bits of information, Haley began to trace his lineage back to its origins in Africa, a process that would consume twelve years of his life.įor me, one of the most startling sections of the novel comes on page 662 of the hardback version. The old African called a guitar a ko, and a river the Kamby Bolongo. His grandmother told him of an ancestor named Kunta Kinte, who landed in ''Naplis' and was given the slave name Toby. It gripped audiences around the world and broke viewing records, some of which still hold to this day.Īuthor Alex Haley grew up with stories about his family's history. The television miniseries version which first aired in January 1977, received 37 Primetime Emmy Award nominations and won 9. It dramatizes factual events with an emotional resonance that haunts the reader long after closing the book. Alex Haley traces some 225 years of his family’s historyfrom his ancestors in Africa, through the trials of American slavery, to his own adulthood in the year of the American bicentennial. Comment: As a novel, which has been classified as both fiction and non-fiction, Roots, is a gripping account of the horror of slavery and of the progress of time.

Alex haley roots the saga of an american family