Question: Roots: The Gift is a 1988 television film, it is the third installment of the "Roots" series, which traces the maternal family history of an African American author, starting with his fourth great-grandfather Kunta Kinte, a character in the novel Roots by which African American author?
Context: "The Griffin Family History" (also known as "Untitled Griffin Family History") is the 27th episode of the fourth season of the animated comedy series "Family Guy".  It originally aired on Fox in the United States on May 14, 2006.  The episode begins after robbers break into the Griffin family home, so the family flees to safety in their panic room.  Trapped with no way out, Peter decides to pass the time by telling his family the story of the Griffin family history, narrating a chain of events that describe their equally exotic and dysfunctional ancestry. Kunta Kinte ( 1750 – 1822; ) is a character in the novel "" by American author Alex Haley.  Haley claimed that Kunta Kinte was based on one of his ancestors: a Gambian man who was born in 1750, enslaved and taken to America and who died in 1822.  Haley said that his account of Kunta's life in "Roots" was a mixture of fact and fiction.  The extent to which Kunta Kinte is based on fact is disputed. Shauna Anderson is an American Indian/African American restaurateur, author, historian, and business woman.  Shauna's maternal grandmother, Virginia L. Battle was Native American.  Shauna's work, preserving the history and tradition of chitlins, was inducted into the Smithsonian's Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History on April 22, 2003, as part of its collection of materials about African American celebrations and foods.  Her autobiography "Offal Great: Memoirs of The Chitlin Queen" is in the Smithsonian Anacostia Library and the Maryland Historical Society Library.  Shauna Anderson recently received the historical gift of a 300-year-old cast iron chitlin cooker and washer used by the slaves. Levardis Robert Martyn "LeVar" Burton Jr. (born February 16, 1957) is an American actor, presenter, director and author.  He is best known for his roles as the host of the long-running PBS children's series "Reading Rainbow", Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge in "" and the young Kunta Kinte in the 1977 award-winning ABC television miniseries "Roots".  He has also directed a number of television episodes for various iterations of "Star Trek", among other programs. The music of Oregon reflects the diverse array of styles present in the music of the United States, from Native American music to the contemporary genres of rock and roll, country, rhythm and blues, jazz, pop, electronic music, and hip hop.  However, throughout most of its history, the state has been relatively isolated from the cultural forces shaping American music.  Much of modern popular music traces its roots to the emergence in the late 19th century of African American blues and the growth of gospel music in the 1920s.  African American musicians borrowed elements of European and Indigenous musics to create new American forms.  As Oregon's population was more homogeneous and more white than the United States as a whole, the state did not play a significant role in this history. Roots: The Gift is a 1988 television film.  It is the third installment of the "Roots" series, which traces the maternal family history of African American author Alex Haley, starting with his fourth great-grandfather Kunta Kinte.  The film premiered on ABC on 11 December 1988, with AT&T as the sole national sponsor for the broadcast.  LeVar Burton and Louis Gossett Jr. reprise their respective roles of Kunta Kinte and Fiddler.  The film takes place between the second and third episodes of the original "Roots" miniseries. Anne Cochran Wilkinson (née Gibbons) (September 21, 1910 – May 10, 1961) was a Canadian poet who was part of the modernist movement in Canadian poetry in the 1940s and 1950s, one of only a few prominent women poets of the time, along with Dorothy Livesay and P. K. Page.  Wilkinson published two books of poetry, "Counterpoint to Sleep" (1951) and "The Hangman Ties the Holly" (1955).  A founding editor and patron of the literary quarterly "The Tamarack Review", she also wrote a family history, "Lions in the Way" (1956), about her maternal family, the Oslers, and a modern fairy tale for children, "Swann and Daphne" (1960), before her early death from cancer in 1961.  Her work was anthologized in "The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse", appeared in several prominent Canadian literary journals of the day, including "Northern Review" and "The Tamarack Review", was broadcast on CBC Radio's "Anthology" and recorded on the album "Six Toronto Poets", alongside the works of W.W.E. Ross, Raymond Souster, Margaret Avison, James Reaney and Jay Macpherson.  Forgotten for several decades, her work has enjoyed a minor revival since the publication in 2003 of "Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson, 1924–1961", edited by Dean Irvine. Alexander Murray Palmer "Alex" Haley (August 11, 1921 – February 10, 1992) was an American writer and the author of the 1976 book "."  ABC adapted the book as a television miniseries of the same name and aired it in 1977 to a record-breaking audience of 130 million viewers.  In the United States the book and miniseries raised the public awareness of African American history and inspired a broad interest in genealogy and family history. Roots: The Saga of an American Family is a novel written by Alex Haley and first published in 1976.  It tells the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and later follows his life and the lives of his descendants in the United States down to Haley.  The release of the novel, combined with its hugely popular television adaptation, "Roots" (1977), led to a cultural sensation in the United States, and it is considered to be one of the most important U.S. works of the 20th century.  The novel spent months on "The New York Times" Best Seller List, including 22 weeks in the top spot on that list.  The last seven chapters of the novel were later adapted in the form of a second miniseries, "" (1979).  It stimulated interest in genealogy and appreciation for African-American history. Roots is an American television miniseries based on Alex Haley's 1976 novel "".  The series first aired on ABC-TV in January 1977.  "Roots" received 37 Primetime Emmy Award nominations and won nine.  It also won a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award.  It received unprecedented Nielsen ratings for the finale, which still holds a record as the third highest rated episode for any type of television series, and the second most watched overall series finale in U.S. television history.  It was produced on a budget of $6.6 million.  The series introduced LeVar Burton in the role of Kunta Kinte.
Answer: Alex Haley