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Tiki Central / General Tiki / James Michener

Post #574513 by Thomas on Thu, Feb 3, 2011 9:25 AM

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T
Thomas posted on Thu, Feb 3, 2011 9:25 AM

Nice to start my day today (Feb. 3) with Garrison Keillor's sonorous voice on The Writer's Almanac ( http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org ) announcing that it's James Michener's birthday. Keillor went on to provide a nice mini-biography (quoting:)
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It's the birthday of the novelist who said: "I have only one bit of advice to beginning writers: be sure your novel is read by Rodgers and Hammerstein." That's James Michener, born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania (1907).

He never knew who his parents were — he was taken to an orphanage as an infant, and adopted by a Quaker woman in Pennsylvania. He grew up in poverty, moving from house to house — they would always leave in the middle of the night. He never had any toys or possessions for himself, didn't get Christmas presents. He beat up younger kids and got beaten up by older ones. When he was 14, he took off and hitchhiked all over the country. He said: "I think the bottom line is that if you get through a childhood like mine, it's not at all bad. Obviously, you come out a pretty tough turkey, and you have had all the inoculations you need to keep you on a level keel for the rest of your life. The sad part is, most of us don't come out."

He said: "I would suppose I learned how to write when I was very young indeed. When I read a child's book about the Trojan War and decided that the Greeks were really a bunch of frauds with their tricky horses and the terrible things they did, stealing one another's wives, and so on, so at that very early age, I re-wrote the ending of the Iliad so that the Trojans won. And boy, Achilles and Ajax got what they wanted, believe me. And thereafter, at frequent intervals, I would write something. It was really quite extraordinary. Never of very high merit, but the daringness of it was."

His mother read aloud all of Dickens' novels, and after a salesman convinced his aunt to buy the complete works of Balzac, she passed them on to her nephew. By the time he got to high school, he had decided he wanted to go to college, and he did — he was a good student and a good athlete, and he got a full scholarship to Swarthmore.

He was drafted into the military during World War II, and he joined the Navy even though he was a Quaker and 36 years old, so he could have gotten out of it. He was stationed in the Solomon Islands, where he kept records of aircraft maintenance. While he was there, he wrote some stories and sketches based on life in the Navy, and he sent his manuscript anonymously to Macmillan. They accepted it, and Tales of the South Pacific was published in 1947. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and Rodgers and Hammerstein adapted it into the hit musical South Pacific (1949).

After that, Michener never had to worry about finances. But he was uncomfortable being wealthy. Instead, he said, "The decent thing to do is to get rid of some of this money." And he did — at least $100 million. He donated the royalties from many of his books, which was no small gesture — he wrote nearly 40 books and they sold an estimated 75 million copies worldwide. Since he himself got to go to prestigious schools for free, through scholarship money, he decided that he would donate to universities so that other people could have the same opportunity. He died of kidney failure in 1997, and left his $10 million estate to Swarthmore, his alma mater. The year before, he had given away $24 million.

His books include Hawaii (1959), Chesapeake (1978), Poland (1983), Alaska (1988), and Texas (1985).

He said, "As a writer I have persisted in my uncertainty, alternating between novels which could charitably be considered literature and world reporting which by another stretch of objective standards might be called history."

And, "I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains."
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