ROOTS - 1976

Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1976. First state dust jacket. Near fine.. Inscribed first edition of the famed epic of the African diaspora, warmly presented by Haley in the year of publication. ROOTS is a saga of dislocation and strength in the face of brutality, reckoning with the complexities of ancestry in the African diaspora caused by the transatlantic slave trade. It begins in 1750 on the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, tracing the lives of multiple generations up to the birth of Haley himself. Michael Eric Dyson explains what ROOTS represented to the descendants of slaves in the United States: "No longer were we genealogical nomads [...] Haley wrote black folk into the book of American heritage and gave us the confidence to believe that we could find our forebears even as he shared his own" ("Haley's Comet"). The 1977 television adaptation was a major cultural event, with an audience of nearly half the American population (NEW YORK TIMES). A triumph of the archives and an American touchtone. 9'' x 6''. Original quarter cloth with brown paper boards. Gilt-lettered spine with brown-stamped spine label. Original price-clipped typographic dust jacket designed by Al Nagy, photographic portrait of the author on rear panel by Alex Gotfryd. Fore edge machine deckle. x, 587, [1] pages. Inscribed by Haley: "11/30/76 / Tom and Barbara McDermott, / I want to join Stan and / Marilyn in wishing you a / Very Merry Christmas! / Alex Haley." A touch of edgewear to jacket spine extremities, light soiling to top edge.