Later Years
In the late 1970s, Haley began working on a second historical novel based on another branch of his family, traced through his grandmother Queen—the daughter of a black slave woman and her white master. Haley died in Seattle, Washington, of a heart attack and was buried beside his childhood home in Henning, Tennessee, with the story unfinished. At his request, it was finished by David Stevens and was published as Alex Haley's Queen. It was subsequently made into a movie in 1993.
Late in his life, Haley had acquired a small farm in Norris, Tennessee, adjacent to the Museum of Appalachia, with the intent of making it his home. After his death, the property was sold to the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), which calls it the "Alex Haley Farm" and uses it as a national training center and retreat site. An abandoned barn on the farm property was rebuilt as a traditional cantilevered barn, using a design by architect Maya Lin. The building now serves as a library for the CDF.
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Famous quotes containing the word years:
“A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The great war that broke so suddenly upon the world two years ago, and which has swept up within its flame so great a part of the civilized world, has affected us very profoundly.... With its causes and its objects we are not concerned. The obscure fountains from which its stupendous flood has burst we are not interested to search for or explore.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)