Roots

Roots is a 1976 book by Alex Haley, published by Doubleday, and it sits between two categories: it is presented as a family history and it reads like a novel. Haley worked from archive material, oral testimony and a research trip to the Gambia, and the book opens with Kunta Kinte growing up in the village of Juffure on the Gambia River.

Kunta is captured while cutting wood, is carried across the Atlantic in the hold of a ship, and is sold in Maryland. Renamed Toby by the men who buy him, he keeps his Mandinka name and his prayers to himself, and the story follows the household he is forced into, the daughter taken from him and sold away, Kizzy, and her son Chicken George, who is freed and takes his family west.

The book works by accumulation rather than by a single plot, and the later chapters carry the family into Tennessee and through the Civil War and the decades that follow. Haley's methods were challenged after publication, and the argument about them is part of how the book is read now. What is not in dispute is its effect: it made genealogy a public subject and sent readers looking into their own family histories.