James A. Michener

James A. Michener
Born	February 3, 1907(1907-02-03) Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, United States
Died	October 16, 1997(1997-10-16) (aged 90) Austin, Texas, United States
Occupation	Novelist Short story writer
Genres	Historical Fiction
Notable work(s)	Tales of the South Pacific (1946)
Notable award(s)	1948: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1977: Presidential Medal of Freedom 2008: Honorary portrait image on a United States postage stamp

James Albert Michener ( /ˈmɪtʃnər/;^[1] February 3, 1907 – October 16, 1997)^[2] was an American author of more than 40 titles, the majority of which were sweeping sagas, covering the lives of many generations in particular geographic locales and incorporating historical facts into the stories. Michener was known for the meticulous research behind his work.

Michener's major books include Tales of the South Pacific (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948), Hawaii, The Drifters, Centennial, The Source, The Fires of Spring, Chesapeake, Caribbean, Caravans, Alaska, Texas, and Poland. His nonfiction works include the 1968 Iberia about his travels in Spain and Portugal, his 1992 memoir The World Is My Home, and Sports in America. Return to Paradise combines fictional short stories with Michener's factual descriptions of the Pacific areas where they take place.

Biography

Michener wrote that he did not know who his biological parents were or exactly when or where he was born.^[2] He was raised a Quaker by an adoptive mother, Mabel Michener, in Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa^[3] and summa cum laude in 1929 from Swarthmore College in English and psychology, he traveled and studied in Europe for two years. Michener then took a job as a high school English teacher at The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. From 1933 to 1936 he taught English at George School, in Newtown, Pennsylvania, then attended Colorado State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colorado), earned his master's degree, and taught there for several years. The library at the University of Northern Colorado is named for him. In 1935 Michener married Patti Koon. He went to Harvard for a one-year teaching stint from 1939 to 1940 and left teaching to join Macmillan Publishers as their social studies education editor.

Michener was called to active duty during World War II in the United States Navy. He traveled throughout the South Pacific on various missions that were assigned to him because his base commanders thought he was the son of Admiral Marc Mitscher.^[4] His travels became the setting for his breakout work Tales of the South Pacific.

In 1960, Michener was chairman of the Bucks County committee to elect John F. Kennedy. In 1962, he unsuccessfully ran as a Democratic candidate for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania, a decision he later considered a misstep. "My mistake was to run in 1962 as a Democratic candidate for Congress. [My wife] kept saying, 'Don't do it, don't do it.' I lost and went back to writing books." Michener was later Secretary for the 1967–68 Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention.

Education

Michener graduated from Doylestown High School in 1925. He attended Swarthmore College, where he played basketball, and joined the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. He graduated with highest honors. He attended Colorado State Teachers College (now named the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colorado), and earned his master's degree.

Writing career

Michener's typewriter at the Michener Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania

Michener's writing career began during World War II, when as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to the South Pacific Ocean as a naval historian;. He later turned his notes and impressions into Tales of the South Pacific, his first book, published in 1947 when he was 40. It became the basis for the Broadway and film musical South Pacific by Rodgers and Hammerstein.^[5] Tales of the South Pacific won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1948.

Michener tried his hand at television writing as well, but found no success in that medium. Among other things, American television producer Bob Mann wanted James Michener to co-create a weekly anthology series from Tales of the South Pacific, with Michener as narrator. Rogers and Hammerstein, however, owned all dramatic rights to the novel and did not give up ownership.^[6] Michener did lend his name to a different television series, Adventures in Paradise, in 1959.^[7] In the late 1950s, Michener began working as a roving editor for Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. He gave up that work in 1970.

Michener was a popular writer during his lifetime; his novels sold an estimated 75 million copies worldwide.^[8] His novel Hawaii (published in 1959) was based on extensive research. Nearly all of his subsequent novels were based on detailed historical, cultural, and even geological research. Centennial, which documented several generations of families in the West, was made into a popular twelve-part television miniseries of the same name and aired on NBC from October 1978 through February 1979.

In 1996, State House Press published James A. Michener: A Bibliography, compiled by David A. Groseclose. Its more than 2,500 entries from 1923 to 1995 include magazine articles, forewords, and other works.

Michener's prodigious output made for lengthy novels, several of which run more than 1,000 pages. The author states in My Lost Mexico that at times he would spend 12 to 15 hours per day at his typewriter for weeks on end, and that he used so much paper his filing system had trouble keeping up.

Spouses

Michener was married three times. In 1935 he married Patti Koon. His second wife was Vange Nord (married in 1948). Michener met his third wife Mari Yoriko Sabusawa at a luncheon in Chicago and they were married in 1955 (the same year as his divorce from Nord). His novel Sayonara is quasi-autobiographical.

Charity

Michener gave away a great deal of the money he earned. Over the years, Mari Yoriko Sabusawa Michener played a major role in directing donations by her husband, totaling more than $100 million. Among the beneficiaries were the University of Texas, the Iowa Writers Workshop and Swarthmore College (stated by a New York Times' notice about her death).

In 1989, Michener donated the royalty earnings from the Canadian edition of his novel Journey, published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, to create the Journey Prize, an annual Canadian literary prize worth $10,000 (Cdn) that is awarded for the year's best short story published by an emerging Canadian writer.^[9]

Final years and death

In his final years, he lived in Austin, Texas, and, aside from being a prominent celebrity fan of the Texas Longhorns women's basketball team, he founded an MFA program now named the Michener Center for Writers.

In October 1997, Michener ended the daily dialysis treatment that had kept him alive for four years. He died on October 16 of kidney failure at the age of 90.^[2][5]

He was buried in Austin, Texas, and is honored by a monument at the Texas State Cemetery.

Michener left his entire $10 million estate (including the copyrights to his works) to Swarthmore College.

Tributes

On the evening of September 14, 1998, the Raffles Hotel in Singapore named one of their suites after the illustrious author, in memory of his patronage and passion for the hotel. Michener first stayed at the Singapore hotel just after World War II in 1949, and in an interview a decade before his death he said it was a luxury for him, a young man, to stay at the Raffles Hotel back then, and had the time of his life. It was officially christened by Steven Green, then Ambassador of United States to Singapore, who noted the writer's penchant of describing 'faraway places with strange-sounding names' to his American book readers. His last stay was in 1985 when he came to Singapore for the launch of the book Salute to Singapore, for which he wrote the foreword. He was so fond of his last stay in Raffles that he took the hotel room key home with him as a souvenir. The suite contains a selection of Michener's works, like Caribbean, The Drifters and Hawaii, as well as two photographic portraits of the author taken at the hotel and in Chinatown in 1985. After his death, the Michener estate corresponded with the hotel management to return the room key, and from there the idea to name the hotel room after him, came into fruition. The souvenir key was duly returned to the hotel, and now on display in the Raffles Hotel Museum.^[5]

On May 12, 2008, the United States Postal Service honored him with a 59¢ Distinguished Americans series postage stamp.^[10]

The Library at The University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colorado, his alma mater, is named The James Michener Library in his honour.

James A. Michener Art Museum

Main article: James A. Michener Art Museum

Opened in 1988 in Michener's hometown of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, the James A. Michener Art Museum houses collections of local and well-known artists. The museum, constructed from the remains of an old prison, is a non-profit organization, with both permanent and rotating collections. Two prominent permanent fixtures are the James A. Michener display room and the Nakashima Reading Room, constructed in honor of his third wife's Japanese heritage. The museum is known for its permanent collection of Pennsylvania Impressionist paintings.

Works

In addition to novels, Michener was very involved with non-fiction, movies, TV show series and radio. This is only a major part of what is listed in the Library of Congress files. The category list would be very complex to add.

Books — fiction

Book Title	Year Published
Tales of the South Pacific	1947
The Fires of Spring	1949
Return to Paradise	1950
The Bridges at Toko-ri	1953
Sayonara	1954
Hawaii	1959
Caravans	1963
The Source	1965
The Drifters	1971
Centennial	1974
Chesapeake	1978
The Watermen	1978
The Covenant	1980
Space	1982
Poland	1983
Texas	1985
Legacy	1987
Alaska	1988
Caribbean	1989
Journey	1989
The Novel	1991
South Pacific	1992
Mexico	1992
Recessional	1994
Miracle in Seville	1995
Matecumbe	2007

Books — non-fiction

Book Title	Year Published	Notes
The Voice of Asia	1951
Rascals in Paradise	1957
The Future of the Social Studies ("The Problem of the Social Studies")	1939	Editor
The Floating World	1954
The Bridge at Andau	1957
Japanese Prints: From the Early Masters to the Modern	1959	With notes by Richard Lane
Report of the County Chairman	1961
The Modern Japanese Print: An Appreciation	1968
Iberia	1968	Travelogue
Presidential Lottery	1969
The Quality of Life	1970
Kent State: What Happened and Why	1971
Michener Miscellany – 1950/1970	1973
Firstfruits, A Harvest of 25 Years of Israeli Writing	1973
Sports in America	1976
About Centennial: Some Notes on the Novel	1978
James A Michener's USA: The People and the Land	1981
Collectors, Forgers — And A Writer: A Memoir	1983
Michener Anthology	1985
Six Days in Havana	1989
Pilgrimage: A Memoir of Poland and Rome	1990
The Eagle and the Raven	1990
My Lost Mexico	1992
The World Is My Home	1992	Autobiography
Creatures of the Kingdom	1993
Literary Reflections	1993
William Penn	1994
Ventures in Editing	1995
This Noble Land	1996
Three Great Novels of World War II	1996
A Century of Sonnets	1997

Adaptations

Title	Notes
The Bridges at Toko-Ri	1953 film
Return to Paradise	1953 film
Men of the Fighting Lady	1954 film
Until They Sail	1957 film based on a short story included in Return to Paradise
Sayonara	1957 film nominated for 10 Academy Awards, won 4; including Best Supporting Actress, for Miyoshi Umeki the first and as of 2010, the only East Asian Actress to win an Oscar.
South Pacific	1958 film
Adventures in Paradise	1959–1962 television series
Hawaii	1966 film
The Hawaiians	1970 film
Centennial	1978 TV miniseries
Caravans	1978 film starring Anthony Quinn
Space	1985 TV miniseries
James A. Michener's Texas
South Pacific	2001 television movie

See also

• List of bestselling novels in the United States
• Edward Rutherfurd

References

1. ^ "Michener". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Fourth ed.). Houghton Mifflin. 2004. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/michener. 
2. ^ ^{a b c} Albin Krebs (October 17, 1997). "James Michener, Author of Novels That Sweep Through the History of Places, Is Dead". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/17/books/james-michener-author-of-novels-that-sweep-through-the-history-of-places-is-dead.html?scp=1&sq=James%20Michener&st=cse. Retrieved November 5, 2009. 
3. ^ Biographical Sketch, James A. Michener Papers, University of Miami liberary
4. ^ Michener, James A. Return to Paradise Random House 1951
5. ^ ^{a b c} "Get me Michener at Raffles". Singapore: The New Paper. September 16, 1998. 
6. ^ Hayes, John Michael. James A. Michener: A Biography, p. 158; Bobbs-Merrill 1984
7. ^ Hayes, p. 159
8. ^ "James Michener Biography". Bookrags.com. http://www.bookrags.com/biography/james-michener/. Retrieved May 3, 2009. 
9. ^ "Journey Prize". http://www.mcclelland.com/jps/. 
10. ^ Two American Legends Appearing on Stamps: The Postal Service Honors James Michener and Dr. Edward Trudeau.

Further reading

• James A. Michener: A Biography, 1985.
• James A. Michener: A Bibliography, 1996.
• Michener and Me: A Memoir by Herman Silverman; hardcover 1999, paperback 2003. Memoir by a long-time friend of Michener.
• Michener: A Writer's Journey, 2005.

External links

• Published books with covers
• James A. Michener Library at the University of Northern Colorado
• James A. Michener Society
• James A. Michener Special Collection: David A. Groseclose
• James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA
• Michener Center for Writers
• Michener: His Influence and Ethics by Edward Rutherfurd
• Working with James A. Michener — The Making of The Covenant
• Biographical Entry at the Texas State Cemetery
• James A. Michener at Find a Grave

Persondata
Name	Michener, James A.
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	February 3, 1907
Place of birth	Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, United States
Date of death	October 16, 1997
Place of death	Austin, Texas, United States