Queen: The Story of an American family by Alex Haley and David Stevens is a partly factual historical novel which has served to bring back to the consciousness of many White Americans the plight of the children of the plantation - the offspring of black slave women and their white masters, who rarely acknowledged the children, who were legally their slaves.

The noted author Alex Haley (1921-1992) was the grandson of blank">Queen, the illegitimate and unacknowledged daughter of James (Jass) Jackson, III (the son of a friend, but not a relative, of _Andrew Jackson) and his slave, Easter. Although the novel alters many historical details to the extent that it cannot be treated as history, the basic outline - including the premise of Jass Jackson's paternity to Queen - has been accepted as fact by Jackson's white descendants. The novel recounts Queen's anguished early years as a slave girl, longing to know who her father was, and how it gradually dawned on her that he was none other than her master. After the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865 and the subsequent abolition of slavery, Queen was cast out. Jass Jackson would not acknowledge her as his daughter, afraid of compromising the inheritance of his legitimate children and goaded by his wife, who despised Queen. After many adventures, often unpleasant, she married a reasonably successful former slave by the name of Alec Haley, and had one son by him. Both Alec and Queen had a son each from previous relationships.

Alex Haley, her grandson, was unable to finish writing Queen before he died, and it was completed by David Stevens. While Stevens benefitted from the many boxes of research notes and a 700-page outline of the story left behind by Haley, he would later say that his writing was guided mainly by their many long conversations.

A plantation owner's son falls in love with a slave named Easter and together they have a light-skinned daughter named Queen. As Queen growns up, she faces the struggle of trying to fit into the troubled world around her. She tries passing for white, but it leads to sorrow in post-Civil War America. Everywhere she goes, she faces obstacles and hardships while searching for happiness and a place to belong. Written by Anonymous