By 1960, Haley left the Coast Guard and a wife, and focused “intensively” on magazine writing. Just two years later, his reputation as an author was set, “linked in part to the growing notoriety of the Nation of Islam.” An assignment he’d accepted allowed him to become good friends with Malcolm X and they began working closely together on a book, even as Haley simultaneously wrote articles against the NOI.
The process of writing The Autobiography of Malcolm X was long and, for his publisher, frustrating but Haley never forgot stories from his grandmother’s porch. Encouraged by a distant cousin, he toyed with a few versions of them and explored the origins of specific words he remembered. His research was extensive and, by the fall of 1966, he thought he’d found the roots of the stories he’d heard…
And that, of course, is still—almost 40 years later—loaded with controversy: how much of Roots was truth? Was Haley guilty of “borrowing” from others’ works? The answers lie somewhere inside “Alex Haley and the Books That Changed a Nation.”
Indeed, Alex Haley was a complicated writer: time and again, he ignored deadlines and sometimes facts to craft a story. That becomes an important point within this biography: he obviously tested the patience of others in many ways, which is astounding and makes it interesting to see how two of the 20th century’s most iconic books came to be.
(“Alex Haley and the Books That Changed a Nation” by Robert J. Norrell, c.2015, St. Martin’s Press$26.99/$31.50 Canada, 251 pages. )
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