While the record may show that James Albert Michener was born on February 3, 1907, the reality is that Michener never knew exactly where or when he was born, nor who his biological parents were. They happily travelled with Michener wherever he was willing to take them.įor a writer who loved shaping details into sprawling stories, his own beginnings would have been ideal fodder for another master of detail, Charles Dickens, and, not surprisingly, Michener loved reading Dickens as a youth. Readers, on the other hand, inhaled the details of both the history and the locations that infused everything he wrote. "Practically entire forests have been felled to produce such trunk-sized novels as Hawaii and The Source," complained one. While praising the scrupulousness of his methodical research, they scorned the denseness of his prose, the stockness of his characters, the convolutions in his storytelling, even the very weight of his tomes. I am a writer," he nonetheless craved acceptance as a serious man of letters. Admitting "I have never called myself an author. But, of course, in the end, writing is not about numbers, no matter how impressive they might be, and that is something of which Michener himself was quite aware. James Michener, Graduation picture, Doylestown High School, 1925.
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