Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, as the son of Simon Alexander Haley and the former Bertha George Palmer. Haley's father was a teacher of agriculture - he taught at several Southern colleges. In 1921 the family moved to the small town of Henning, Tennessee. Alex lived there for five years. His grandfather owned the local lumber company and when he died, Haley's father took over the business. Alex's mother taught in the local elementary school. She died when Alex was 10 and his father remarried two years later. In Henning Alex heard stories from his maternal grandmother, Cynthia Palmer, who traced the family genealogy to Haley's great-great-great-great-grandfather, who was an African, called "Kin-tay". He was brought by slave-ship to America and named Toby.

Haley did not excel at school or university. From 1937 to 1939 he studied at Elizabeth City Teachers College in North Carolina. During WW II Haley enlisted in the Coast Guard as a mess boy. In 1941 he married Nannie Branch. The marriage ended in divorce in 1964, and in the same year Haley married Juliette Collins. They in divorced in 1972. Haley's third wife was the former Myra Lewis of Los Angeles. "I'm just not a stationary husband," Haley once said.
Haley started to write adventure stories to stave off the boredom, and getting a new rating - Chief Journalist. For his fellow sailors he composed love letters, which they sent to their girlfriends and wives. His other writings Haley submitted for magazines for eight years and received countless rejection slips, before his first text was published. However, during these frustrating years he learned the basics of his craft. After twenty years of service, Haley left the Coast Guard in 1959 to become a full-time writer. After 30 years of service he was entitled to a pension. He wrote for Reader's Digest biographical features, interviewed Miles Davis for Playboy, and produced THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X, his first major work. It appeared in 1965 and had an immense effect on the black power movement in the United States. Haley worked with the spokesman for the Nation of Islam (Black Muslim) movement, Malcolm X (Malcolm Little, 1925-1965), for nearly two years, one year writing the text. From their conversations he created the story of Malcolm X, told in his own words. The book sold more than six million copies by 1977 in the United States and other countries.

In 1965 Haley stumbled upon the names of his maternal great-grandparents, when he was going through post-Civil War records in National Archives in Washington, D.C. During a trip to the British Museum in London he saw the famous Rosetta Stone, which had unlocked the secret of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. The idea - to decipher a historic unknown by matching it with that was known, started an odyssey that took 11 years and which is now part of literature history. On basis of family tradition and research, Haley traveled by safari to the village of Juffure, to trace his own ancestor and to meet with a native griot, oral historian, who could name Haley's own ancestor Kunta Kinte.
When Roots appeared in 1976 it gained critical and popular success, although the truth and originality of the book faced criticism. James Baldwin considered in his New York Times review, that Roots suggest how each of us are vehicle of the history which have produced us. On the other side - representing a minority opinion - Michael Arled viewed the book and television series as Haley's own fantasies about 'going home.' The story starts from Juffure, a small peaceful village in West Africa in 1750. It ends in Gambia, in the same village, after several generations. Haley depicts realistically his ancestor's life - the villagers suffered occasionally from shortage of food. "But Kunta and the others, being yet little children, paid less attention to the hunger pangs in their bellies than to playing in the mud, wrestling each other and sliding on their naked bottoms. Yet in their longing to see the sun again, they would wave up at the slate-colored sky and shout - as they had seen their parents do - 'Shine, sun, and I will kill you a goat!'" Haley doesn't imagine that it is possible to return to some Paradise. In Juffure, among the villages, he realizes in shock that the color of his skin is much lighter that theirs. Skeptics claimed that the griot, Kebba Kanji Fofana, an old man, was a well-known trickster and told Haley just what he wanted to hear. However, Haley donated money to the village for a new mosque. He had also founded in the early 1970s with his brothers the Kinte Foundation to collection and preservation of African-American genealogy records.

In 1977 Roots won the National Book Award and a special Pulitzer Prize. The book sold in one year more than million copies and became the basis of courses in 500 American colleges and universities. It challenged the view of black history as explored in such works as Stanley M. Elkin's Slavery (1959). Slaves did not give up all their ties to African culture, but humor, songs, words and folk beliefs survived. The book showed that the oppressed never became docile: Kunta Kinte suffered amputation of a foot for his repeated attempts to run away. He valued his heritage so much that he never accepted the ways of his slave masters and insisted on being called by his real name Kinte, not by his slave name Toby.
Roots, the television miniseries, run from January 23 to January 30, 1977, and attracted some 130 million viewers - the largest audience up to then. More people have seen the series than read the book. The idea of miniseries had not been used widely in the United States except on public television. ABC had in the 1975-76 success with Rich Man, Poor Man, which encouraged the network to finance additional miniseries, including Roots. The show was shown on eight consecutive nights, an hour or two each night. During the time it played a heavy heavy blizzard snowed up one third of America. Each episode was complete within itself, ending in positive, hopeful note, exempt the sixth and seventh. - Roots was produced by ABC, written by William Blinn, Ernest Kinoy, James Lee, and M. Charles Cohen, directed by David Greene, John Erman, Marvin J. Chomsky, Gilbert Moses, and starring Ed Asner, Chuck Connors, Carolyn Jones, O.J. Simpson, Ralph Waite, Lou Gossett, Lorne Greene, Robert Reed, LeVar Burton (as Kunta Kinte), Ben Veeren (as Chicken Geroge), Lynda Day George, Vic Morrow, Raymond St Jacques, Sandy Duncan, John Amos, Leslie Uggams, MacDonald Carey, George Hamilton, Ian MacShane, Richard Roundtree, Lloyd Bridges, Doug McClure, Burl Ives. - A second series, Roots: The Next Generations, was shown in 1979. It spanned the period from 1882 to the 1970s. The show run in six 96 minutes episodes.