Alex Haley Dies -- Author Who Inspired Millions With `Roots' Suffers Apparent Heart Attack In Seattle

Alex Haley, whose book "Roots: The Saga of an American Family" became a television miniseries that brought to life a fictional black family and taught millions of Americans about the cruelty of slavery, died early today at a Seattle hospital. He was 70.

Haley, whose other works included "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," was admitted to Swedish Hospital last night and died shortly after midnight, nursing supervisor John Folkrod said.

Haley died of an apparent heart attack, suspected to have been caused by heart disease, said Don Marvin, investigator for the King County medical examiner.

Marvin said he was told by hospital officials that Haley was admitted to the emergency room about 11 p.m. and despite CPR treatment died at about 12:04 a.m. The medical examiner must be notified of all deaths in hospital emergency rooms.

The doctor at Swedish signed the death certificate, eliminating the need for an autopsy because the death was from natural causes.

Haley's family was flying to Seattle from the East Coast, Folkrod said.

Haley had been scheduled to speak at a banquet tomorrow at the Naval Submarine Base in Bangor, Kitsap County.

He won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for "Roots," a mix of painstakingly researched fact and imagined fictional detail tracing his ancestors back to the village in Gambia, West Africa, from which they originated.

The 12-hour miniseries adapted from the book drew 130 million viewers, then the largest audience in television history.

"It was the story of our people. It was the story of how we came from Africa," said Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in his Baltimore home today. "The facts about the extended family he grew up in and that most black families grow up in is so important.

"He was truly a gifted person who wrote a book that was monumental," Hooks said.

Seattle writer Charles Johnson, creative-writing professor at the University of Washington who won the National Book Award in 1990 for his novel "Middle Passage," said, "It's a tremendous loss. He was a much-loved writer who produced two much-loved books (`Malcolm X' and `Roots').

"Two books that rare in a single lifetime is something special. You have two classics and that's pretty hard to pull off - and that by a man who was primarily a journalist."

For the past five years, Haley traveled around the country telling stories of African-American heritage at black family reunions sponsored by the Washington, D.C.-based National Council of Negro Women.

"He was such a great storyteller. He took historic material and brought it within reach of everyone," said Dorothy Height, the council's president and a friend of Haley's for 25 years. "He could talk to people with the least educational and social background and he could talk to people with the highest and make everyone feel like they were human beings of great worth."

John Rice Irwin, founder-director of the Museum of Appalachia in Norris, Tenn., and a friend of Haley's since 1982, recalled one time during a lunch in New York with several celebrities when the author disappeared.

"Someone looked back in the kitchen and he was signing autographs for all the cooks," he said. "He spent more time doing things and talking with common people . . . the people at the gas pumps. He wasn't impressed with celebrities."

INSPIRED EARLY ON BY RELATIVES

Haley was born in Ithaca, N.Y., and grew up in the west Tennessee town of Henning. He said he was inspired to become a writer by the storytelling of his older relatives.

His grandmother's and great-aunts' storytelling led Haley to devote 12 years meticulously tracing his mother's side of the family back six generations. His warm-hearted and rich descriptions of his ancestors' lives set off a wave of interest in genealogy.

Haley enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1939 as mess boy and served for 20 years in the military before starting a magazine-writing career.

His first book, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," sprang out of a series of interviews Haley conducted with the civil-rights leader.

After "Roots" transformed him into a sought-after celebrity, Haley did much of his writing aboard cargo ships, booking passage four times a year to escape ringing telephones and speaking invitations.

Haley said in a 1988 interview that he was able to become a writer because his father pulled himself up by the bootstraps and left sharecropping behind.

"I was a sailor, I was a cook and this and that, and it might be said I was bootstrapped up to being a writer, but the real bootstrapping was that which preceded me," he said.

`SWAMPED' BY DEMANDS AFTER `ROOTS'

Haley's first book after "Roots" did not come for 12 years. It was a novella, "A Different Kind of Christmas," that told the tale of Fletcher Randall, a wealthy Southern plantation owner who undergoes a moral conversion and joins the Underground Railroad to help free a group of slaves.

In an interview in 1988 about the Christmas book, Haley told Seattle Times book editor Donn Fry about the intervening dozen years:

"If you're blessed to do something like `Roots'. . . you find yourself immersed. You're asked to do this, to do that - all for admirable causes. But you're just swamped."

Haley said that in 1978 alone, he received 2,065 requests to address various groups.

"The biggest negative is that it's so hard to write - and that's what I am: a writer," he said.

Last month, Haley announced he was giving up life on his Tennessee farm to devote more time to writing. He had put the 127-acre farm in Norris, about 20 miles north of Knoxville, up for sale.

Haley recently took a sea voyage to finish a book about the town of Henning. He also had talked about doing one on C.J. Walker, the first black woman in America to earn $1 million.