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Alex Haley and
the Books That Changed a Nation
by Robert J. Norrell
c.2015, St. Martin’s Press
$26.99 / $31.50 Canada
251 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
The gardening catalogs started arriving this week – right on
time.
In the gray of winter, they represent so much promise,
whether you have six acres or six inches of dirt. This time
of year, it’s fun to imagine what will come from the soil
months from now – but in the meantime, read Alex Haley
and the Books That Changed a Nation by Robert J. Norrell,
and see how a career can grow.
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Born in 1921 into a well off Irish-African-American family,
Palmer Alexander Murray Haley was raised mostly by his
grandmother, who instilled in him a love of storytelling. As
an adult, Haley would recall hiding behind rocking chairs on
his grandparents’ front porch, listening to tales of “the
African” and of slavery.
In 1939, after rejecting his professorial father’s ideal of
an education, Haley (by now, calling himself “Alex”) joined
the Coast Guard. Because of racial mores of the time, few
onboard jobs were open to African-American men, so he worked
as a steward while also searching for assignments as a
magazine writer. Ultimately, he came under the command of a
“boss” who demanded help with letter-writing; his skills
honed, Haley landed a job as a press officer for the Coast
Guard.
By 1960, Haley left the Coast Guard and a wife, and focused
“intensively” on magazine writing. Just two years later, his
reputation as an author was set, “linked in part to the
growing notoriety of the Nation of Islam (NOI).” An
assignment he’d accepted allowed him to become good friends
with Malcolm X and they began working closely together on a
book, even as Haley simultaneously wrote articles against
the NOI.
The process of writing The Autobiography of Malcolm X
was long and, for his publisher, frustrating but Haley never
forgot stories from his grandmother’s porch. Encouraged by a
distant cousin, he toyed with a few versions of them and
explored the origins of specific words he remembered. His
research was extensive and, by the fall of 1966, he thought
he’d found the roots of the stories he’d heard…
And that, of course, is still – almost 40 years later –
loaded with controversy: how much of Roots was truth?
Was Haley guilty of “borrowing” from others’ works? The
answers lie somewhere inside Alex Haley and the Books
That Changed a Nation.
Indeed, Alex Haley was a complicated writer. Time and again,
he ignored deadlines and sometimes facts to craft a story.
That becomes an important point within this biography: he
obviously tested the patience of others in many ways, which
is astounding and makes it interesting to see how two of the
20-century’s most iconic books came to be. Truth or fiction,
those two works, as author Robert J. Norrell proves,
absolutely shook up the status quo of culture and history.
Unlike many biographies that portray their subjects as too
perfect, Alex Haley and the Books That Changed a Nation
keeps things real and I liked that. If you’re up for a
well-told, warts-and-all bio, this one will have you rooted
to your seat. |
