Roots Writer Haley (5 letters) and Alex Haley (9 letters) refer to the same person, the late American author Alex Haley. He is best known for his 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which was adapted into a television miniseries in 1977. The novel tells the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured and sold into slavery in the United States, and follows his life and the lives of his descendants in the U.S. through to the Reconstruction Era. Alex Haley won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1977.