"I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomas's, Aquinas, More and Jefferson - the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt."
(from The World is My Home, 1992)

American novelist, essayist, and travel book writer, best known for his massive and detailed novels (Hawaii, Centennial, Texas, etc) many of which were born in his workshop with assistants and researchers. Michener wrote his first book at the age of thirty-nine and immediately won a Pulitzer Prize.

According to his own words James A. Michener was a foundling who had no knowledge of the place or date of his birth, according to other sources he was born in New York and taken as an orphan to Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He was raised by Mabel Michener, a Quaker widow. He started to write sports column at the age of fifteen for the local newspaper and edited the high school student paper.

From his early youth, Machinery listened to opera music, which helped him to see human experience in a more dramatic form than facts would warrant. He also started to collect reproductions of paintings. Among his favourite artists were Florentine (1420-1497), the Dutch painter Carel Fabritius (1622-1654), an Italian Renaissance artist named Benozzo Gozzoli, and Ando Horoshige (1797-1858), a Japanese woodblock artist. In high school and college Michener hitchhiked to all parts of America, and he continued to travel widely through his life in different parts of the world. From 1950 through 1953, he reported on the Korean War, he operated in 1956 behind Russian lines during the Hungarian Revolution, in 1963 he spoke for the liberation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in Leningrad, in 1964 he travelled in the Russian provinces facing Afghanistan, in 1972 he accompanied President Nixon on his visit to Moscow, Iran, and Poland, from 1972 through 1981, he visited Poland nearly a dozen times, and in 1972 he was with Nixon in China.

Michener majored in English at Swarthmore College, and took his B.A degree in 1929. He received a Lipincott travelling grant and studies attended St. Andrew's in Scotland, studied Italian art in Siena and at the British Museum in London. He also collected folksongs in the Hebrides and visited Spain while a crewmember on a freighter. In 1935 Michener graduated from the University of Northern Colorado with an M.A.

From 1929 to 1931 Michener was master at the Hill School in Pottstown and from 1934 to 1936 at the George School in Newton. He was a professor at the University of Northern Colorado (1936-40), and then visiting professor of history at Harvard's School of. Education (1940-41). When the United States entered the World War II Michener decided to enlist in the Navy although as a Quaker he was exempt from actual military service. From 1944 to 1946 he served as a naval historian in the South Pacific and travelled widely. His early fiction is also based on his experiences in the Pacific. Between the years 1941 and 1949 Michener was associate editor at the Macmillan Company, New York. Since 1949 he devoted himself entirely to writing.

Michener won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for the collection Tales of the South Pacific. The stories depicted Navy officers and enlisted men, Marines, Seabees, and nurses as well as the inhabitants of the islands during the war. The book received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was basis for the famous Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein musical. Critics classified the work as a series of short fiction, although the author himself considered it a novel because of the unified setting and the recurrence of several characters throughout the book.

The following novel, THE FIRES OF SPRING (1949) was a semi-autobiographical story about a poor, creative artist trying to establish himself as a writer in New York. RETURN TO PARADISE (1950) brought together essays and fictional stories about the Pacific islands. It was followed by THE BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI (1953), a story set against the Korean War and depicting a self-sacrificing jet pilot. In SAYONARA (1954) Michener returned to the world of Madame Butterfly and depicted the ill-fated romance of an American officer and a Japanese woman.

In 1949 Michener had moved to Hawaii, there he completed his long historical novel, which combined history and fiction. The story started from the geological beginnings of the islands to the migrations of the Polynesians and the arrival of the Europeans. Using the same formula Michener produced several large novels, including CARAVANS (1963), SOURCE (1965), inspired by the author's travel to Israel, CENTENNIAL (1974), POLAND (1983), TEXAS (1985), ALASKA (1988) and MEXICO (1992). He also wrote non-fiction, among others KENT STATE (1971) a study of the events in 1970 that led to the killing of four students by the Ohio National Guard during a Vietnam War protest. LEGACY (1987) was a short essay-like novel that criticized the United States' tendency to criticize the world, and THE NOVEL (1991) was a story of the settlement of Pennsylvania by the Dutch.

Michener ran unsuccessfully in 1962 on the Democratic ticket for the U.S. House of Representatives. He was a member of the advisory committee on the arts for the U.S. Department of State in 1957, served as a secretary of Pennsylvania's Constitutional Convention in 1967-68, and was member of the Advisory Committee, United States Information Agency (1970-76), Council of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (1980-83). Since 1983 he was member of the Board, International Broadcasting. Michener received more than 20 honorary degrees, and was awarded both the Navy Gold Cross and National Medal of Freedom.

During his career as a writer Michener wrote some 40 books, which sold about 75 million copies. Many of his works have also been adapted for film and television. Michener was married three times: to Patti Koon in 1935 (divorced 1948), to Vange Nord in 1948 (divorced in 1955), and to Mari Yoriko Sabusawa in 1955. In 1992 at the age of eighty-five, Michener published his autobiography, THE WORLD IN MY HOME. He died after his decision to stop the treatment for renal disease.

For further reading: World Authors 1900-1950, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); The World is My Home by James A. Michener (1992); James A. Michener by J.P. Hayes (1984); James A. Michener by G.J. Becker (1983); In Search of Centennial by J. Kings (1978); James A. Michener by A.G. Day (1964, rev. 1977); The Subject is Israel by Dore Schary and James Michener (1968)

Michener about other writers: (on Multatuli=Eduard Douwes Dekker) "When I first read, as an impressionable young man, the Java novel Max Havelaar, by Eduard Douwes Dekker, I was astounded by the freedom with which he incorporated in his novel material of the most revolutionary character: price lists, data on the cultivation of sugarcane, long disquisitions on life in Indonesia and political analyses." (on Flaubert) "Curiously, I never studied the way in which a gifted novelist like Flaubert can gather together a group of characters within a limited compass and give the entire novel a sense of the universal." (on Norman Mailer) "I used to think that the Norman Mailer of The Naked and the Dead, published when he was twenty-five, was merely a sensationally successful one-book author, and his first books thereafter seemed to prove that. But he revealed himself as a protean man with the widest possible interest and the skill to tackle them all, from pertinent comments on politics to a biography of Marilyn Monroe... He has been invaluable to American life because he is an authentic American voice." (on Gore Vidal) "Gore Vidal, who wrote Williwaw at only nineteen, was another whose early book could well have been his last, but instead he wrote a series of books that varied in subject matter from the critical days of early Christianity to the dramatic eras of American history to outrageous sexual games. I envy him two novels on whose subjects I also did a great deal of work: Julian, which deals with the apostate who tried to turn back Christianity in ancient Antiochea, and 1876, which covers the amazing incident in American history that year when the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes stole the presidential election from the Democrat Samuel J.Tilden."

• ed.: THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL STUDIES, 1939
• THE UNIT IN SOCIAL STUDIES, 1940 (with H.M. Long)
• TALES OF THE SOUTH PASIFIC, 1948 - film 1958, dir. by Joshua Logan
• THE FIRES OF SPRING, 1949
• RETURN TO PARADISE, 1950
• THE VOICE OF ASIA, 1951
• THE BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI, 1953
• SAYONARA, 1954 - film 1957, dir. by Joshua Logan
• THE FLOATING WORLD, 1954
• THE BRIDGE AT ANDAU, 1957 (with A.G. Day)
• RASCALS IN PARADISE, 1957
• SELECTED WRITINGS, 1957
• ed.: HOKUSAI SKETCHBOOK, 1958
• JAPANESE PRINTS, 1959
• HAWAII, 1959 - film 1966, dir. by George Roy Hill, script by Daniel Taradash and Dalton Trumbo
• REPORT OF THE COUNTY CHAIRMAN, 1961
• THE MODERN JAPANSESE PRINT, 1962
• CARAVANS, 1963 - film 1978, dir. by James Fargo
• THE SOURCE, 1965
• IBERIA, 1968
• PRESIDENTIAL LOTTERY, 1969
• FACING EAST, 1970
• THE QUALITY OF LIFE, 1970
• KENT STATE, 1971
• THE DRIFTERS, 1971
• A MICHENER MISCELLANY, 1973
• ed.: FIRSTFRUITS, 1973
• CENTENNIAL, 1974 - also television series
• ABOUT "CENTENNIAL", 1974
• SPORTS IN AMERICA, 1976
• CHESAPEAKE, 1978
• THE COVENANT, 1980
• SPACE, 1982 - also television series
• COLLECTORS, FORGERS - AND A WRITER, 1983
• TESTIMONY, 1983
• POLAND, 1983
• TEXAS, 1985
• LEGACY, 1987
• ALASKA, 1988
• JOURNEY, 1989
• CARIBBEAN, 1989
• THE EAGLE AND THE RAVEN, 1990
• PILGRIMAGE, 1990
• SIX DAYS IN HAVANA, 1990 (with J. Kings)
• THE NOVEL, 1991
• MEXICO, 1992
• THE WORLD IS MY HOME, 1992
• JAMES A. MICHENER'S WRITERS HANDBOOK, 1992
• MY LOST MEXICO, 1992 (with J. Crafton and H.S. Commager)
• AMERICA, 1992
• CREATURES OF THE KINGDOM, 1993
• LITERARY REFLECTIONS, 1993
• MIRACLE IN SEVILLE, 1995
• RECESSIONAL, 1995
• THIS NOBLE LAND, 1996