This week saw both the debut on BBC4 of a star-studded mini-series based on Alex Haley’s Roots, and the 25th anniversary of Haley’s death on 10 February 1992. That the latter was not accompanied by a clutch of major reassessments testifies to his fascinatingly ambiguous status: he is the most-read African American author ever – The Autobiography of Malcolm X (which he co-authored with the black nationalist leader) sold 6m copies in its first decade, Roots sold the same number in its first year alone – yet is forever tainted by controversy and kept out of the canon.
What’s strange about the sniffiness towards Haley is that his impact was felt in literary fiction, as well as by the 130 million Americans who viewed the (much less classy) original adaptation of Roots in 1977. Published the previous year, the saga charts the lives of six generations of Haley’s family, starting with a putative 18th-century ancestor in the Gambia, Kunta Kinte, who is enslaved and transported to America, and put slavery and Africa back on the agenda. Before Roots, leading black novelists – Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin – had largely stuck to contemporary or recent-past American subject matter. But after it, Octavia Butler used time travel to explore slavery in Kindred (1979), Alice Walker deployed an African subplot in The Color Purple (1982) and Toni Morrison made a fugitive slave her protagonist in Beloved (1987).
Beloved was predictably voted the most influential African-American novel of the 20th century in a poll of PBS viewers. But as Frances Smith Foster has pointed out, “in terms of actual audience and effect on politics and policies, Roots has been the most influential such story in the modern era”. Beyond the literary realm, Haley’s books are credited with not only introducing millions to black history but also inspiring the genealogy boom – Who Do You Think You Are? and similar series are directly descended from Haley’s research on his family tree. His work continues to resonate in popular culture, most recently when the rapper Kendrick Lamar cited The Autobiography as the book that changed him and recorded the 2015 track “King Kunta”, in which Roots’ rebel slave becomes a swaggering crime lord.
In 1977, Roots did a rare double, winning a Pulitzer prize and a National book award, in both cases a “special citation”. But that was before Haley was forced to settle a plagiarism suit out of court – conceding the following year that parts of it were lifted from a 1967 novel, The African – and before significant elements of the book’s family history unravelled when investigated: no documentary evidence could be found for parts of the 19th-century story, and the griot who was his sole source in the Gambia may have just been amiably telling him what he wanted to hear (“most of us feel it’s highly unlikely that Alex actually found the village whence his ancestors sprang”, tutted his friend Henry Louis Gates Jr, the pope of African American studies, in 1998, calling Roots “a work of the imagination”). The Autobiography has also been criticised, for distorting the facts of Malcolm X’s life to give it narrative shape.
Had Haley presented Roots from the outset as a novel (or overwhelmingly fictional), the doubts about its authenticity wouldn’t have mattered. But he didn’t. His appendix stresses how far he went to corroborate his family’s “oral history” via documents found in 50-odd archives over 12 years of digging, while acknowledging that “most” of the dialogue and incidents are a “novelised amalgam” of knowledge and hunch. So instead of being acclaimed as one of the pioneers of “creative non-fiction” or the “non-fiction novel” - The Autobiography appeared in 1965, a year before Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, usually regarded as the first experiment with such genre fluidity - he is viewed askance by the binary minded literary-academic establishment: not a pure enough novelist(and possibly too vulgarly popular) to be lined up alongside those he paved the way for, nor a credible enough scholar to be treated as a forerunner of the black historians whose careers Roots made possible. Missing, therefore, from the canonical, 2,800-page Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, co‑edited by Gates, is the most seminal African American author of them all.
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