---
name: "Alex Haley"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/alex-haley"
roles: ["Creator","Writer"]
born: "11 August 1921"
died: "10 February 1992"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 1
updated: "2026-09-16T16:49:19.063799+00:00"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Alex Haley

Creator and writer. Born 11 August 1921 in Ithaca, New York, USA. Died 10 February 1992.

## Details

- **Work:** Creator, Writer
- **Born:** 11 August 1921, Ithaca, New York, USA
- **Died:** 10 February 1992

## Fi1m on Alex Haley

> Alex Haley makes family relationships central to history that can otherwise reduce people to numbers. *Roots* earns our warm recommendation through its actors, even when the storytelling presses harder than their performances need.

In *Roots* (1977), violence is inflicted on people whose names and family relationships the drama asks us to remember. Alex Haley keeps those connections central to his account of slavery, giving us reasons to care about each person caught within it. We warmly recommend the series for that attention, and for the actors who sustain it. The writing sometimes pushes harder than it needs to, but its attention to individual lives earns our patience.

*The Autobiography of Malcolm X* (1965) was built from extensive interviews with its subject, an earlier example of Haley's interest in an individual's account. His only credited feature screenplay, *Super Fly T.N.T.* (1973), came between that collaboration and his long family-history project. For *Roots: The Saga of an American Family* (1976), he combined oral history, genealogical research and novelistic techniques. Where records were absent, he used novelistic methods to re-create the past, a decision that helps explain both the appeal of the work and the caution it requires. Twelve years went into the research and writing before the book became the source for the 1977 television series.

There is a useful lesson here in how far a writer should trust a cast. LeVar Burton and the ensemble make the suffering personal, giving us people worth attending to throughout a demanding programme. The violence is hard to keep at a comfortable distance because the drama has made its victims more than anonymous figures in an account of American history. We were moved by *Roots* because those performances kept our attention on family relationships even when the violence was difficult to watch. When the storytelling presses harder, we notice the prompting; the actors have already given us enough.

The source book calls for another kind of caution. Some of its genealogical and historical details were later shown to be inaccurate, and its mixture of fact and fiction was greater than first presented. The family connections give the drama its force, but they cannot settle questions about the accuracy of the research.

## Biography

Alex Haley was an American writer. He served in the US Coast Guard from 1939 to 1959 before becoming a full-time author.

Haley is best known for *The Autobiography of Malcolm X* (1965), written in collaboration with its subject, and the novel *Roots: The Saga of an American Family* (1976). The latter was adapted into a television miniseries that aired in 1977, for which Haley received credit as writer and creator. The book and series drew large audiences and prompted widespread interest in genealogy.

Haley received a special Pulitzer Prize citation for *Roots* in 1977.

*Sources: en.wikipedia.org, britannica.com, biography.com.*

## On Fi1m (1)

- *Roots* (1977), Fi1m 83, Creator, Writer — [page](https://film.one/tv/roots.md)

## Also known for

- *Malcolm X* (1992), Book — [page](https://film.one/film/malcolm-x.md)
- *Roots* (2016), Novel, Book

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/alex-haley