Haley received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1977. Four thousand deans and department heads of colleges and universities throughout the country in a survey conducted by Scholastic Magazine selected Haley as America’s foremost achiever in the literature category. (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was selected in the religious category.) The ABC-TV network presented another series, Roots: The Next Generation, in February 1979 (also written by Haley). Roots had sold almost five million copies by December 1978 and had been reprinted in twenty-three languages.

Haley’s later literary projects included a history of the town of Henning, Tennessee, and a biography of Frank Wills, the security guard who discovered the Watergate break-in. In the television series Palmerstown, USA (1980), Haley collaborated with the producer Norman Lear. The series was based on Haley’s boyhood experiences in Henning.

A Different Kind of Christmas (1988) was a short novella, in which a slave manages to escape and as a result, the son of slaveholding southern parents slowly realizes that the practice of slavery is wrong. Then, in the late 1980s, Haley began working on a second historical novel based on another branch of his family, traced through his grandmother Queen—the daughter of a black slave woman and her white master. Queen (1993) was a strong epic novel, which focused on Simon Alexander Haley’s side of the family.

In 1987 Haley left his home in Beverly Hills, California, and moved to Tennessee, his family’s home state. Haley died of a heart attack on February 10, 1992 at the Swedish Hospital Medical Center in Seattle, Washington before he could complete Queen. At his request, the novel was finished by David Stevens and was published as Alex Haley’s Queen. It was subsequently made into a movie in 1993.

Haley was posthumously awarded the Korean War Service Medal from the government of South Korea ten years after his death. This award, created in 1999, did not exist during Haley’s lifetime, but demonstrates how both his life and his legacy continue to impact the lives and works of people throughout the world to this day.