“ The Autobiography of Malcolm X, more than any other writing in American history, shaped the idea of Black Nationalism and made it a much more broad-based movement in American life,” Norrell says by phone from his home in Asheville, N.C. Norrell’s studies of the impact that Washington and Malcolm X had on black life led him to Alex Haley. Washington, an examination of Washington’s controversial policies and methods of African-American uplift. Norrell, a 63-year-old professor of American history at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, has written a number of books about the intrigues and intricacies of race, including The House I Live In: Race in the American Century-a narrative history of race in America that includes an early appraisal of Malcolm X-and the biography Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Haley sold more books than any other African-American author and all but a few white ones.” But the glow of Haley’s success was dimmed by charges of copyright infringement and historical fraud, along with his turbulent personal life
“Each of his books sold at least six million copies, and the films made from them were viewed and appreciated by the masses of America. “Haley wrote the two most influential books in African-American history in the second half of the 20th century,” Norrell notes, referring to The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976). Norrell posits that Haley should be included in that pantheon.
But in his new biography, Alex Haley and the Books That Changed a Nation (St. If you were asked to name the most prominent African-American writers of the 1960s and ’70s, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison would easily come to mind.
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