DIED. Alex Haley, 70, author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family and The Autobiography of Malcolm X; of a heart attack; in Seattle. Roots, published during America's Bicentennial in 1976, was Haley's fictionalization of the tracing of his ancestry back to its West African roots. The next year it became the basis for an eight-part television mini-series that provided a rude reminder that the birth of the nation was not without severe moral complications. Haley's Pulitzer-prizewinning account of the slave trade and plantation life, always gripping, not always accurate, made white America confront its own dark roots. For millions of African Americans, however, Haley's publishing and video sensation was a cause for celebration. The sins of bondage and racism have been dramatized from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the 1952 novel that revealed a disorienting world in which blacks had no history, and therefore, no identity. Haley's "faction," as he called it, provided one. The book was ultimately translated into 30 languages. "Roots," wrote James Baldwin, "is a study of continuities, of consequences, of how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one."