Synopsis
James A. Michener was one of the most beloved storytellers of our time. In this full-length biography of both the private and the public Michener, Stephen J. May draws on Michener's complete papers as well as interviews with his friends and associates to reveal how an aspiring writer became a best-selling novelist.
May follows the young Michener from an impoverished Pennsylvania childhood to the wartime Pacific, where he found inspiration for Tales of the South Pacific, a book that led to a string of other best sellers, including The Source, Centennial, Chesapeake, and The Covenant. Examining Michener's body of writing in its biographical and cultural contexts, May describes the creation of each novel and assesses the book's strengths and shortcomings. He also provides insight into Michener's personal life and unique working methods and explores the author's hypersensitivity to criticism, his egotism, and his failure on some occasions to acknowledge the contributions of his assistants.
This probing biography establishes Michener's place in twentieth-century letters as it offers an unprecedented view of the man behind the typewriter.
Publishers Weekly
The best thing and the worst thing that happened to James Michener (1907-1997) was the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for his first book, Tales of the South Pacific. Suddenly famous, he endured the backlash-the disdain of many critics-for the rest of his career. May, biographer of Zane Grey, uses Michener's complete papers and other sources to construct a picture of a man who excelled as a journalist and a writer of popular fiction, yet craved the literary acclaim that he never achieved. Michener is seen as a man of paradoxes; he was a benefactor of libraries and young writers, but "in at least two cases" used collaborators "without proper acknowledgment." He callously returned his adopted son to a group home after his first marriage broke up. May speculates that growing up poor and fatherless (he believed himself to be adopted) stunted Michener's emotions, and that the generational histories in his fiction were an attempt to compensate for a black hole in his life. The research is assiduous. and Michener's years as a textbook editor at Macmillan and his association with legendary editors Saxe Commins and Albert Erskine will interest those in the trade. Though this is a dutiful portrait, May cannot reach beneath the impenetrable surface of a man who seems to have lived fully only within the pages of his books. 19 b&w photos. Agent, Elizabeth Pomada. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.