Roots: The Saga of an American Family
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Roots: The Saga of an American Family is a novel written by Alex Haley and first published in 1976. It tells the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and follows his life and the lives of his alleged descendants in the U.S. down to Haley. The release of the novel, combined with its hugely popular television adaptation, Roots (1977), led to a cultural sensation in the United States. The novel spent weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List, including 22 weeks in that list's top spot. The last seven chapters of the novel were later adapted in the form of a second miniseries, Roots: The Next Generations, in 1979.
Following the success of the original novel and the miniseries, Haley was sued by author Harold Courlander, who successfully asserted that Roots was plagiarized from his own novel The African, published nine years prior to Roots in 1967. The resulting trial ended with an out-of-court settlement and Haley's admission that some passages within Roots had been copied from Courlander's work.
As for the novel's historical accuracy, researchers have cast doubts on whether Haley truly tracked down his ancestry to a specific village and individual, or was merely being told what he wanted to hear by the people who lived there.
