The radical, Pulitzer Prize-winning account of Alex Haley's own twelve-year search for his family's origins: a powerful memoir, a history of slavery and a landmark in African-American literature.WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY DAVID OLUSOGA Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book AwardTracing his ancestry through six generations of architects, lawyers, blacksmiths, farmers, freedmen and slaves, Alex Haley’s research took him back to Africa and a sixteen-year-old youth named Kunta Kinte. Torn from his homeland and brought to the slave markets of the New World, re-imagining Kunta’s journey would allow Haley to explore his family’s deep and distant past.‘A gripping mixture of urban confessional and political manifesto, Roots not only inspired a generation of black activists, but drove home the bitter realities of racism to a mainstream white liberal audience’ Observer