Background

James Albert Michener was born about February 3, 1907 and raised by an adoptive mother, Mabel Michener, in Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He did not know who his biological parents were.

Education

Michener graduated from Doylestown High School (now Central Bucks High School West) in 1925. He attended Swarthmore College, in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where he played basketball and was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. After graduating summa cum laude in 1929, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and History, he traveled and studied in Scotland at the University of St Andrews in the medieval town of St. Andrews for two years.

Career

James Michener accepted a guest lecturer position at Harvard, from 1939 to 1940, but left to join Macmillan Publishers as their social studies education editor.

Michener was enlisted in the United States Navy during World War II. He served as a naval historian in the South Pacific from 1944 to 1946, and his early fiction is set in this area. He traveled throughout the South Pacific Ocean on various assignments which he gained because his base commanders mistakenly thought his father was Admiral Marc Mitscher. His experiences during these travels inspired the stories published in his breakout work Tales of the South Pacific.

Michener’s novels were usually massive in scope, and he researched them extensively. Novels such as Hawaii (1959) and The Source (1965) typically open with the earliest history of an area - the geology, flora, and fauna - and ultimately encompass the people who settle and rule there. He sometimes spent years preparing a book, as he did in Spain for Iberia: Spanish Travels and Reflections (1968). Michener wrote with journalistic skill, aiming to instruct. Although he was criticized for the abundance of detail and facts in his fiction, his books were extremely popular, offering the reader a carefully and elaborately created world.

In his later years, Michener turned his interest to American landscapes in Centennial (1974) and Chesapeake (1978). The Covenant (1980) concerns South Africa and the background of apartheid. Another massive opus was Space (1982), in which he tried, with mixed results, to fictionally chronicle the U.S. space program. Mexico (1992) fictionally deals with the problems of contemporary Mexico, partly as seen through the lens of bullfighting. There is also a strong dramatization of Indian slavery in the country’s silver mines.

Not all of Michener’s works were fictional. The Fires of Spring (1949) was autobiographical, as was his 1992 memoir, The World Is My Home. His last completed book was A Century of Sonnets (1997).

Achievements

• James Michener was best known as an outstanding novelist and short-story writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for the collection Tales of the South Pacific (1947). Moreover, in 1977 Michener was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
  
  In addition, in 1981 Michener was awarded the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1993, the U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation awarded Michener its "Lone Sailor Award" for his naval war service and his literary achievements.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Sayonara

    (From a great master of historical fiction comes a brillia...)

    1954
  • Space

    (Already a renowned chronicler of the epic events of world...)

    1982
  • Alaska

    (In this sweeping epic of the northernmost American fronti...)

    1988
  • Recessional

    (In this remarkable novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author J...)

    1994
  • Journey

    (One of the premier novelists of the twentieth century, Ja...)

    1989
  • Iberia

    (Spain is an immemorial land like no other, one that James...)

    1968
  • The Drifters

    (In this triumphant bestseller, renowned novelist James A....)

    1971
  • Centennial

    (Written to commemorate the Bicentennial in 1976, James A....)

    1974
  • The Source

    (In his signature style of grand storytelling, James A. Mi...)

    1965
  • Texas

    (Spanning four and a half centuries, James A. Michener’s m...)

    1985
  • Caribbean

    (In this acclaimed classic novel, James A. Michener sweeps...)

    1989
  • Hawaii

    (Pulitzer Prize-winning author James A. Michener brings Ha...)

    1959
  • Mexico

    (Pulitzer Prize-winning author James A. Michener, whose no...)

    1992
  • The Fires of Spring

    (An intimate early novel from James A. Michener, now remem...)

    1949
  • Caravan

    (First published in 1963, James A. Michener’s gripping chr...)

    1963
  • Poland

    (In this sweeping novel, James A. Michener chronicles eigh...)

    1983
  • Chesapeake

    (In this classic novel, James A. Michener brings his grand...)

    1978
  • The Bridge at Andau

    (The Bridge at Andau is James A. Michener at his most grip...)

    1957
  • The Covenant

    (James A. Michener’s masterly chronicle of South Africa is...)

    1980
  • Tales of the South Pacific 1947

Religion

Michener was a Quaker.

Politics

In 1960, Michener was chairman of the Bucks County committee to elect Democrat John F. Kennedy as the 35th President. In 1962, he unsuccessfully ran as a Democratic Party 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."

In 1968, Michener served as the campaign manager for the third-term run of the twice-elected U.S. Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania. Michener later served as Secretary for the 1967–1968 Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention. Also that year, Michener was a member of the Electoral College, serving as a Pennsylvania Democrat. He wrote about that experience in a political science text Presidential Lottery: The Reckless Gamble in Our Electoral System, which was published the following year. In it, he suggested alternate systems, including using a direct popular vote by the majority for the office of President of the United States.

Views

Michener in later life was a great philanthropist, contributing millions of dollars to universities and the Authors League Fund. Prior to his death, he donated 1,500 Japanese prints to the University of Hawaii.

Membership

James Michener was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity.

Connections

James Michener was married three times. He married Patti Koon in 1935. In 1948, they divorced, and the same year Michener married his second wife, Vange Nord. Michener met his third wife, Mari Yoriko Sabusawa, at a luncheon in Chicago. Michener divorced Nord in 1955 and married Sabusawa the same year. Sabusawa died in 1994.

Adoptive mother:

Mabel Michener

ex-spouse:

Patti Koon

ex-spouse:

Vange Nord

late spouse:

Mari Yoriko Sabusawa

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series
• Talking with Michener James Michener's vast work has intrigued millions of readers. Popularizing history, he wrote extensively about travel and covered broad areas of America in books such as Centennial, Texas, Hawaii, Alaska, and Chesapeake.
  1999