Word: haleys
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...matter of course, he was shunted into the steward's department. Recounts Haley: ''I was on an ammunition ship in the southwest Pacific, and the big problem was boredom and loneliness. I had never thought of being a writer, but I wrote lots and lots of letters. And crew members began to come to me for help in writing love letters. I got pretty good at this, and before long it kinda got to be I didn't have to cook any more. I just wrote love letters." While copying passages from a book (he cannot remember which...
...Haley collected hundreds of rejection slips before he finally sold his first piece to This Week, a syndicated Sunday supplement. Before long he was known as "the cook who writes," and by the time he retired from the Coast Guard in 1959 at the age of 37, he had attained the rank of chief journalist. Though he had served for 20 years, he received no pension checks?those went to one of his two former wives...
...Haley began getting regular assignments from the Reader's Digest and later Playboy, where he inadvertently created that magazine's monthly interview format while doing a piece on Jazz Trumpeter Miles Davis. Another of his subjects was Black Muslim Leader Malcolm X, which led to his first book. Published in 1965, The Autobiography of Malcolm X became a 6-million-copy bestseller...
Hanging In. Haley moved into a basement apartment in New York City's Greenwich Village and tried to support himself as a freelance writer. "Everyone I knew was saying 'Writing is nice, but why don't you get a job?' I owed everyone. One day a friend called with a civil service job that paid $6,000 a year. I turned it down. I wanted to make it writing. My friend banged the phone down. I owed him too. I took psychic inventory. I looked in the cupboard, and there were two cans of sardines, marked...
...weeks after finishing the Malcolm X manuscript, Haley wandered into the National Archives Building in Washington. The family history, told and retold by his grandma, still intrigued him. "The Kinte story, which had been passed down by many generations of slaves, was not elaborate. It was really very simple. But it was the story around which whole generations coalesced. It kept us together. It made us proud of who we were and from where we had come." Haley asked a clerk in the microfilm room for the 1870 census records of Alamance County, N.C., where his forebears had lived...