While his editors were still proofing the final chapters of Texas, the author flew off to Alaska in search of yet another site big enough to contain a Michener novel. And the 78-year-old Michener seems far from retirement. Even before it was completed, Texas was snapped up by ABC for a 10-hour miniseries. Texas, his latest effort, will have a first printing of 750,000 copies, the largest ever for a work of fiction. “Don’t read it, lift it,” cracked a critic of one of his books. But neither his output nor his income has earned him the respect of literary critics, who have always denied Michener entrance to the ranks of “serious” writers.
Perhaps the world’s richest author, Michener has donated more than $15 million to charities, museums and educational institutions. The Michener tradition of huge books, huge readership and huge profits endures: His novels from the Seventies (Centennial, Chesapeake) and the Eighties (The Covenant, Space and Poland) have all topped best-seller lists, with The Covenant alone accounting for one-fourth of all fiction sales during the week before Christmas, 1980. In the late Sixties he turned his attention to his own country, producing non-fiction works on politics ( Presidential Lottery, 1969) the environment ( The Quality of Life, 1970) and youthful rebellion ( Kent State-What Happened and Why, 1971). Beginning with T ales of the South Pacific (1947), the first book of short stories to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (and the basis for the eternally popular musical, South Pacific) and continuing with The Fires of Spring (1949) The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1953) Sayonara (1954) Hawaii(1959) and The Source (1965), Michener has become everyman’s guide to the world.
With 35 books in print in 16 languages, Michener is one of the best-selling authors of all time, pied piper to millions of readers for whom he is not only a novelist but a historian-or “docunovelist,” as he has been called.
Glance at a bookshelf in this country or almost anywhere in the world, and you’ll probably see one of the lunch-box-sized novels of James A.
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