Alex Haley - Later Years

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.

Read more about this topic:  Alex Haley

Famous quotes containing the word years:

    “In the years of President Ford
    Decorum and calm were restored.
    He did nothing hateful
    For which we were grateful
    But terribly, terribly bored.”
    —Anonymous.

    “Not so many years ago there there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel—movement through space—provided the universal metaphor for change.... One of the subtle confusions—perhaps one of the secret terrors—of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.”
    —Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)