Archive for Publishing
Writing “Roots”
In 1976, a couple years after I got started in Genealogy, Alex Haley wrote a book called “Roots.” Soon this book was turned into the first Mini-Series on television. For a week in 1977, millions of viewers glued themselves to their televisions and a bowl of popcorn and watched this slave saga unfold from the jungles of Africa to the plantations of Virginia.
It was a smash hit! It spawned a sequel, it made Alex Haley famous overnight!
And it was all based on a flawed Genealogy, poor research techniques and plagiarism.
It was fiction.
