JAMES A. MICHENER 
February 3, 1907 - October 16, 1997

“I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.”
 

~ An orphan, Michener was adopted by Mabel Michener, a poor Quaker widow with two children. They lived in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

~ According to John Hayes, author of James A. Michener: A Biography (1984), Mabel was actually Michener's birth mother, but she used the adoption story because she was unmarried.

~ As a boy, Michener endured torment from his classmates for wearing wrinkled secondhand clothes and toeless sneakers with broken, knotted laces.

~ At the age of fifteen, Michener started to write a sports column for the local newspaper and edited the high school student paper.

~ Michener loved to listen to opera. He also collected reproductions of paintings. Among his favorite artists were the Dutch painter Carel Fabritius, the Italian Renaissance artist Benozzo Gozzoli and Ando Horoshige, the Japanese woodblock artist.

~ In high school and college, Michener hitchhiked all over the country. He traveled by boxcar, worked in carnival shows, and before he was 20 years old, had visited all but three of the states in the Union.

~ From these early experiences grew Michener's lifelong insatiable curiosity about people, cultures and faraway lands. "Those were years of wonder and enchantment, ... some of the best years I would know. I kept meeting American citizens of all levels who took me into their cars, their confidence and often their homes."

~ Michener majored in English at Swarthmore College, and graduated with honors. He received a traveling grant and attended St. Andrew's in Scotland, studied Italian art in Siena and at the British Museum in London.

~ In 1935 Michener graduated from the University of Northern Colorado with an M.A.

~ Michener edited textbooks for a New York publishing firm, Macmillan, a position that was interrupted by World War II. Michener joined the Navy.

~ From his wartime experiences in the Solomon Islands came his first book, Tales of the South Pacific.

~ He submitted it anonymously to his former employer, Macmillan. Published in 1947, the book won a Pulitzer Prize.

~ After the war, Michener won his job back as a textbook editor, and Rodgers and Hammerstein adapted his story into a musical. South Pacific was a Broadway hit.

~ He continued to travel widely throughout his life. In 1972 he accompanied President Nixon on his visit to Moscow, Iran, Poland and China.

~ Most of Michener's works are historical novels, all distinguished by exhaustively thorough research. Among them are: The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Sayonara, The Source, Centennial, Chesapeake, The Covenant, Poland, Texas and Hawaii.

~ Rumor had it Michener used an army of researchers to gather background material for his epic 900-page novels. Truth was, he achieved his massive work with the help of only three secretaries.

~ In 1992 at the age of eighty-five, Michener published his autobiography, The World Is My Home.

~ At the end of his life, Michener still maintained a disciplined routine of writing. He woke at 7 AM, had a light breakfast and went straight to work. At 1 PM, he broke for lunch, and then took a nap. The evenings, he "kept to himself."

~ When Michener developed renal disease, he spent hours undergoing kidney dialysis. For a man who had been everywhere in the world, his inability to travel was more upsetting than the dialysis. "I sit in the TV room and see shows on the big ships I used to travel or areas that I used to wander, and a tear comes to my eye."

~ He died soon after he chose to stop the treatment.

~ Over his lifetime, Michener published more than four dozen books. His work has been printed in virtually every language in the world, with hardcover and paperback sales running into the millions.