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Haley, Alexander Palmer (Alex)
4 articles on Haley, Alexander Palmer (Alex)
Haley, Alex
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 489 Includes: Bibliography(b. 11 August 1921; d. 10 February 1992), writer and journalist whose books inspired widespread public interest in African American history. Born in Ithaca, New York, Alexander Murray Palmer Haley was raised in Henning, Tennessee, where he grew up listening to his maternal relatives telling family histories. These stories made a lasting impression on Haley, who later incorporated them into his 1976 best-selling historical novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family.A college dropout, Haley began writing while serving in the U.S. Coast Guard from 1939 to 1959. After retiring he worked as a freelance writer, interviewing notables including Miles Davis and Malcolm X for Playboy magazine. His acquaintance with Malcolm X eventually led to their collaboration on the Autobiography of Malcolm X ( ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 7151921–1992
African American journalist and author of two influential books of African American history. Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, and grew up in Henning, Tennessee, with maternal relatives who spent many hours telling family stories, some of which extended back to Africa. This exposure directed the course of much of Haley's work as an adult. Haley completed high school at the age of fifteen and attended two years of college, but was uninspired by his studies and left school to join the U.S. Coast Guard. He began writing to counteract the tedium of life at sea. When Haley retired from the service in 1959, he was a mature, self-taught writer.Haley settled in Greenwich Village in New York City, determined to make his name as a journalist. After a period of hard work and obscurity, he ...
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Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 1550 Includes: Further Reading | Obituary:(11 Aug. 1921–10 Feb. 1992), writer, was born Alexander Palmer Haley in Ithaca, New York, the son of Simon Alexander Haley, a graduate student in agriculture at Cornell University, and Bertha George Palmer, a music student at the Ithaca Conservatory of Music. Young Alex Haley grew up in the family home in Henning, Tennessee, where his grandfather Will Palmer owned a lumber business. When the business was sold in 1929, Simon Haley moved his family to southern black college communities, including Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College in Normal (near Huntsville), Alabama, where he had his longest tenure teaching agriculture. The three sons of Bertha and Simon Haley, Alex, George, and Julius, spent their summers in Henning, where, in the mid-1930s, their grandmother Cynthia Murray Palmer ...
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Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 806(1921–1992), journalist and novelist. Born on 11 August 1921 in Ithaca, New York, Alexander Murray Palmer Haley grew up in Henning, Tennessee, the first of three sons to Simon Henry Haley, a professor of agriculture, and Bertha George Palmer, a school-teacher. In 1937, he attended Hawthorne College in Mississippi, and then transferred to Elizabeth City State Teachers College in North Carolina, which he attended for two years. He enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard in 1939 and completed a twenty-year tour of duty, first as a messboy, and then, in 1950, as Chief Journalist. He married three times, fathering three children. During the 1940s, Haley began writing short anecdotal sketches about the coast guard, some of which he published in Coronetmagazine. In the 1950s, he continued to publish short, ...
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