Meanwhile, he married Nannie Branch in 1941 and they had two children, Lydia Ann and William Alexander. In the Coast Guard, Haley worked as a cook and made his first attempts at writing to fight the boredom aboard ship. Haley found himself penning love letters for his shipmates to send home to their wives and girlfriends. These letters would become practice for serious pieces that he submitted to various magazines. However, it took eight years and several hundred rejection notices before his first story was published in
This Week, a syndicated Sunday supplement. Apparently impressed by this accomplishment, the Coast Guard created a new post especially for him. He became the service's chief--and only--journalist. Throughout his lifetime, Haley often returned to the sea to find peace and to write.
When Haley retired from the Coast Guard in 1959 he became a full-time writer and journalist. Times were lean at first. Moving into an apartment in New York's Greenwich Village, Haley told Morrow that all he had was "18 cents in my pocket. That's all I had in the world. There was nowhere to go but up." The day after that low point, Haley received a check for a piece he had written.
This is a free page. This page contains 196 words. This
biography contains 1,943 words (approx. 6 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Alex Haley Access Pass.
