Alex Haley was a journalist, essayist, and historical novelist, but he is best known for writing the benchmark 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which was celebrated as an affirmation of African American heritage and as a universal story of humankind's search for identity. The fictionalized account of seven generations of his own family from their ancestral home in Africa to their days as slaves in America was made into a television movie that aired for one week on consecutive nights in 1977, drawing millions of American viewers. Lance Morrow of Time said, "Along the way, Americans of both races discovered that they share a common heritage, however, brutal; that the ties that link them to their ancestors also bind them to each other." Eleven years before Roots, Haley also gained recognition for writing an "as-told-to" autobiography of Malcolm X that was released shortly after the leader...