James Albert Michener (1907–1997) was an American novelist, remembered as one of the country's most prolific and widely read authors. He was born on 3 February 1907 in New York City, orphaned as an infant, and raised by a Quaker widow, Mabel Michener, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania; little is known of his biological parents. Despite growing up in poverty he was an avid reader and student, won a scholarship to Swarthmore College, and graduated summa cum laude in 1929. He later studied in Europe, earned a master's degree from the University of Northern Colorado, and did postgraduate work at Harvard. Michener worked as a teacher and editor before becoming a full-time writer. During the Second World War he served in the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific, an experience that deeply shaped his writing. His first book, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948 and was adapted into the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific. He became known for epic, research-intensive historical novels that span generations and centuries, each exploring the history and culture of a particular region. His notable works include Hawaii (1959), The Source (1965), Centennial (1974), Chesapeake (1978), The Covenant (1980), Poland (1983), Texas (1985), Alaska (1988), and Caribbean (1989). Total sales of his books are estimated at more than 75 million copies worldwide, and his work helped popularize the large-scale, deeply researched historical novel. Michener married three times; his third wife, Mari Yoriko Sabusawa, was his partner for nearly forty years until her death in 1994. He was an extraordinarily generous philanthropist, giving an estimated $100 million to educational institutions, libraries, and the arts during his lifetime, including major gifts to the University of Texas. He died on 16 October 1997 in Austin, Texas, at the age of ninety, of kidney failure, having voluntarily discontinued dialysis.
2 works on Textopian