Archive of Haley's prime research material for the writing of Roots. Includes hundreds of pages of original manuscript, both typed and holograph, photographs, interviews, photocopies of Haley's genealogical research, etc. Contained in 16 boxes, accompanied by a typed index. Inventory# 20275 Price Upon Request Historical Background: Alex Palmer Haley (1921-1992) was born in upstate New York, but his parents moved back to Henning, TN so that his father could take over his late grandfather's lumber company. As a boy, Haley had heard stories about his family and an African ancestor named "Kin-tay" from his maternal grandmother. These stories would later form the basis of Haley's search for his family's origins and the subsequent writing of his best-known book, Roots .
Roots was released in 1976, but Haley had begun work on it as early as 1965. While doing research on African-Americans in the post Civil War period at the National Archives in Washington, Haley came upon a reference to his maternal great-grandparents. For the next eleven years, he searched through historical records, traveled to Juffure in Africa, and conducted scores of interviews. Roots was an instant success upon publication and was followed soon after by the equally successful television
mini-series. In 1977, Roots won the National Book Award and a special Pulitzer Prize.
Though Haley loved to write, he was his own harshest critic, rewriting, adding to and editing his manuscripts through many drafts. The material in this archive provides a unique insight into the long and sometimes painful process of writing which finally emerged as Roots. It represents eleven years of research and also includes manuscript material for Haley's unpublished book Search , which was intended to chronicle the story of his years of research. This archive, Haley's final manuscript, and his other papers, were sold in a little publicized forced estate auction in 1993. The buyer at that sale owned it until Seth Kaller acquired the archive very recently.
This is only a fraction of the archive of Haley's prime research material for the writing of Roots. The archive includes hundreds of pages of original manuscript, both typed and holograph, photographs, interviews, photocopies of Haley's genealogical research, etc. Contained in 16 boxes, accompanied by a typed index.
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