Photo Phinish: Alexander Murray Palmer Haley

February 18, 2010 by theo.johnson
Filed under: Blog Entries, Education, Entertainment & Sports, Photo Phinish

Alex Haley began his writing while in the U.S. Coast Guard.

[b.1921 - d.1992]

Born on August 11,1921 in Ithaca, New York, Alexander Murray Palmer Haley grew up in Henning, Tennessee, the first of three sons to Simon Henry Haley, a professor of agriculture, and Bertha George Palmer, a school-teacher. In 1937, he attended Hawthorne College in Mississippi, and then transferred to Elizabeth City State Teachers College in North Carolina, which he attended for two years. He enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard in 1939 and completed a twenty-year tour of duty, first as a messboy, and then, in 1950, as Chief Journalist. During the 1940s, Haley began writing short anecdotal sketches about the coast guard, some of which he published in Coronet magazine. In the 1950s, he continued to publish short, mostly biographical pieces in Coronet, as well as in Readers Digest, Atlantic, and Harper’s. He retired from the coast guard in 1959 to become a freelance writer.

In the early 1960s, he continued to publish short articles, among them an exposé of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam for the Saturday Evening Post. At the same time, he began a series of interviews for Playboy magazine, including ones with Miles Davis, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali), Jim Brown, and Quincy Jones. His interview with Malcolm X led to their collaboration on The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). Haley’s probing questions of Malcolm X and editorial skills helped shape what has undoubtedly become the most influential twentieth-century African American autobiography.

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