Harold Courlander

Harold Courlander (b. Indianapolis, September 18, 1908 – d. March 15, 1996) – Anthropologist, folklorist, ethnomusicologist, writer, and novelist. At age six, Indianapolis-native Harold Courlander moved with his family to Detroit, where he grew up in a multi-cultural environment. After attending the University of Michigan and Columbia and working various jobs that appealed to his interest in writing, travel, and world cultures, he became a world-renown writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Inspired by his travels and fieldwork, he mostly wrote about African, African-American, Caribbean (especially Haitian), European, Southeast Asian (especially Indonesian), and Native American cultures. As a tune collector, he was especially active from 1947 to 1960, when he served as editor of the Ethnic Folkways Library. In that span of time, he produced around fifty albums on Folkways and made the first published recordings of countless musical traditions. In addition to his monumental contribution to field recording, he wrote several books that included transcribed stories and analytical studies of particular cultures with focus on religion, folklore, music and dance. Among his seven published novels is The African (1967), which was proven by the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York to be the model for Alex Haley’s Roots. After blatant examples of plagiarism were brought out in the trial of 1971, Haley and Courlander settled out of court to the tune of about $650,000.