TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/022492/0224542.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 1.4 KB | 31 lines

                                                                                MILESTONES, Page 68


    DIED. Alex Haley, 70, author of Roots: The Saga of an American
Family and The Autobiography of Malcolm X; of a heart attack; in
Seattle. Roots, published during America's Bicentennial in 1976,
was Haley's fictionalization of the tracing of his ancestry back
to its West African roots. The next year it became the basis for
an eight-part television mini-series that provided a rude
reminder that the birth of the nation was not without severe
moral complications. Haley's Pulitzer-prizewinning account of
the slave trade and plantation life, always gripping, not always
accurate, made white America confront its own dark roots. For
millions of African Americans, however, Haley's publishing and
video sensation was a cause for celebration. The sins of bondage
and racism have been dramatized from Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin to Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph
Ellison's Invisible Man, the 1952 novel that revealed a
disorienting world in which blacks had no history, and
therefore, no identity. Haley's "faction," as he called it,
provided one. The book was ultimately translated into 30
languages. "Roots," wrote James Baldwin, "is a study of
continuities, of consequences, of how a people perpetuate
themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to
liberate, the coming one."