Blockbuster Author Michener Dies

James A. Michener, the extravagant storyteller who delivered whole states, whole nations--indeed, whole epochs--to an adoring international audience by wrapping historical fact in sweeping fiction, died Thursday. He was 90 and died at his home in Austin, Texas.

The author of such blockbusters as “Hawaii,” “Texas,” “Centennial” and “Iberia”--which sold in incredible volume, despite their imposing length--Michener died of renal failure.

He had been in frail health in recent years, undergoing a quadruple bypass and hip surgery. Though he continued to work, his need for kidney dialysis three times a week forced him to stay close to his modest home in Austin.

His condition had deteriorated to the point where he ordered his doctors to take him off the dialysis unit last week, and his death had been imminent since.

Michener leaves behind fans all over the globe, readers who grabbed every book he wrote regardless of the topic, certain he would carry them away with his broad narratives while teaching them history, geography, botany and more.

Los Angeles Times book editor Steve Wasserman said: “James Michener’s death diminishes American letters. He was the most democratic of authors, believing passionately in the promise of America, with a profound love of its people.

“His generosity of spirit was palpable in the books he wrote, which gave pleasure to millions the world over.”

Michener did not write his first manuscript until he was 40. But that book--”Tales of the South Pacific,” typed out in a Navy Quonset hut by the glow of a foul-smelling lantern--won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1948.

From then on, he wrote, and wrote, and wrote.

Forty-seven books. One hundred million copies sold. Movie, theater and miniseries spinoffs. Translations into at least 50 languages.

The Michener Phenomenon, publishers called it.

To be sure, Michener did much else in his long life besides pump out bestsellers. He was a philanthropist who donated a fortune to education. He was a sought-after teacher, too. And an art collector who wrote two books on Japanese prints. He won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, this country’s highest civilian honor.

Proud to be called a knee-jerk liberal, Michener was also passionately political; he even ran for Congress himself. He spoke out against McCarthyism. He lobbied for the right to die. He chaired President John F. Kennedy’s Food for Peace Program. He served on a committee that recommended worthy figures to adorn U.S. postage stamps.

But his true love--and his true gift--was telling stories.

He approached his craft with methodical, journeyman style. As he told a radio interviewer in 1992: “My job is to be a hard-working man who sits at a modern typewriter and tries to write books that a lot of people will want to read.”

By that measure, he succeeded in the grandest possible style.

Critics might call Michener’s fiction flat, might carp about his cardboard characters or his dreary dialogue. Fellow novelists might grumble that he moralized too much, used too many cliches, digressed too often. His readers didn’t care. They knew they could count on Michener to transport them to another time, another place--to enlighten even as he entertained.

He wrote about space, and they bought it. He wrote about sports, and they bought that, too. He wrote about presidential politics, racial discrimination, South Africa, the Caribbean, nursing homes.

They bought it all.

Indeed, the devotion of Michener’s readers was legendary.

They dreamed up plots to secure advance copies of upcoming books. They wrote him that old aunts, wasting away on deathbeds, had asked for his novels to be read aloud. They even named their children after his characters.

One reviewer summed up the appeal this way: “Michener’s are the beach books that, unlike most other beach books, leave you smarter than you were when you started reading. Each delivers the product of all that research, doled out to the reader at just the right rate. You know right away who the bad guys are--the petty ones, the stingy ones. The heroes are generous and energetic and smart and, above all, unprejudiced.”

Despite his roaring commercial success, Michener never took a vacation. He worked seven days a week. He rarely treated himself to luxuries. And he never thought of himself as a bona fide author.

“I think the word ‘author’ ought to be reserved for those figures that used to appear in our classrooms in America years ago, people from the last century, always with beards, always with three names--James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson,” he once said.

To another reporter, he commented: “I’m not a brilliant mind. I’m more Germanic. I’m the guy who can see the thing through. I know how to organize material. That’s different than the sheer brilliance of a Norman Mailer or a Truman Capote.”

But his fans would say he had his own brand of brilliance.

*

James Albert Michener knew next to nothing about his origins.

Like adventure novelist Harold Robbins, who died Tuesday and who surpassed Michener in copies sold but not in critical praise, Michener was an abandoned child.

Born Feb. 3, 1907, probably in New York City, he was a foundling, as he called himself. A Quaker woman named Mabel Michener took him into her home in rural Doylestown, Pa., and raised him as her own.

The family was poor. Young James sometimes went hungry. He always wore castoff clothes. For a few bleak periods, he was forced to return to the orphanage because Mabel Michener could not afford to feed him. Still, he remembered some happy times. Mabel read him the classics, especially Dickens. She imbued him with a strong Quaker faith, which propelled his lifelong commitment to fighting discrimination. And he was able to indulge his itch for travel one year by hitchhiking through 45 states.

When, as a teenager, Michener learned that Mabel was not his biological mother, he said he “had a bad three days.” But he resolved not to think of it again. He also vowed not to attempt to track down his birth parents. From then on, Michener rarely revisited the subject of his childhood, not even while writing his curiously detached 1991 memoir, “The World Is My Home.”

“It has not mattered in my life, not even one-tenth of one percent,” he once said.

A skilled athlete and excellent student, Michener attended Swarthmore College on a scholarship (over the objections of his high school principal, who feared he would shame the school by flunking out). The principal suggested Michener become a plumber. Instead, he went to Swarthmore--and graduated summa cum laude in 1929.

After a brief stint teaching in a local school, Michener won a fellowship to travel abroad--and embarked on an adventure of the kind he would later learn to put in prose. He toured with Spanish bullfighters, worked on a cargo ship in the Mediterranean, explored folk legends on islands off the coast of Scotland.

But though he collected color wherever he went, Michener did not try his hand at writing. Not yet.

Instead, he returned to teaching social studies for a time, then accepted a post as associate editor with Macmillan Co. in New York. The experience, he later said, proved to be excellent grounding for his writing career. “I learned what a great many people never learn,” he said. “I learned how to write a sentence and how to write a paragraph.”

Michener turned those skills to good use as he wound down his tour of duty as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Setting up a typewriter in a musty Quonset hut, he tapped out the series of short stories that became “Tales of the South Pacific.”

Though some critics complained that the stories were too long, “Tales of the South Pacific” won praise for its texture, its drama, its originality. “Romantic, nostalgic, tragic--call it what you will--this book seems to me the finest piece of fiction to come out of the South Pacific War,” one reviewer proclaimed.

Even when honored with the Pulitzer Prize, however--beating out novels by John Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis--the book did not become a bestseller. Michener did not make real money off it until Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II adapted it into the musical “South Pacific.” (“I have only one bit of advice to the beginning writer,” Michener said years later. “Be sure your novel is read by Rodgers and Hammerstein.”)

Royalties from the musical allowed Michener to pursue his writing career full-time.

Later, of course, his other books made him a very rich man, and his official biography notes that he donated more than $100 million to charity over the years. His donations to University of Texas at Austin topped $37 million, including $15 million for a writers’ program. Michener also gave away his impressive collections of Japanese and American art. And he put dozens of students through college.

Michener’s financial success really started with “Hawaii,” published by Random House in 1959. By then he had married his third wife, Mari Yoriko Sabusawa, a librarian who would stay at his side until her death in 1994 after 38 years of marriage. (He will be cremated and buried beside her Tuesday in Austin.)

“Hawaii” was an instant hit.

The novel’s scope was audacious, its approach striking. In it, Michener swept through hundreds of years of history by creating fictional families and then tracing their lives through generations.

His characters were not subtle; psychological insight was not the point. Michener was not even particularly concerned with plot. His goal was to use his fictional families to illuminate sociological issues and moral concerns and, of course, as a vehicle for reviewing history.

The formula proved wildly successful. And it established Michener as a brand-name, bankable author. “I stumbled on the device of the long novel,” he said in 1996, “and the crazy things sold unbelievably.”

Indeed, after “Hawaii,” Michener would use the same format for many of his most famous books, including “The Source” (about Israel), “The Covenant” (about South Africa), “Iberia” (Spain) and “Centennial” (the American West).

Michener churned out these regional tapestries with astounding speed.

He produced “Space” in 1982, “Poland” in 1983, “Texas” in 1985. He broke from the tried-and-true format to write “Legacy,” a novel based on the Iran-Contra scandal, in 1987. But the slim novel was panned by critics, and Michener returned to his familiar heavy tomes with “Alaska” in 1988, “Caribbean” in 1989 and “Mexico” in 1992. (He had actually started “Mexico” 30 years earlier, but lost the manuscript; when a relative found it in a neglected cupboard, he freshened it up and finished it.)

Though his prolific pace made it hard to believe, Michener always insisted he did all his research himself, aided only by his longtime assistant John Kings.

Michener made repeated visits to each place he wrote about, sometimes living there for months or even years to steep himself in the atmosphere before memorializing it in print. Lodged for a time in Maryland, say, or Colorado, he would make every effort to think like a local. He would badger his wife to haunt the supermarkets and bring him word of the chit-chat she heard. He would listen to the weather reports, attend the sporting events, interview residents from all walks of life.

“He knows everybody from the Pope on down. He’ll talk to a plumber just as he’ll talk to Bill Clinton,” Michener’s secretary, Theresa Potter, recounted.

He also read incessantly. According to Kings, he went through 200 to 300 books in preparation for each novel.

Michener took tremendous pride in his ability to synthesize all that information and turn even the dullest facts into an appealing story. “If I try to describe a chair,” he once said, “I can describe it so that a person will read it to the end.”

Still, some critics called his works interminable. “He begins with the first faint primordial stirrings on the face of the deep and slogs onward through the ages until he hits the day before yesterday,” scoffed one reviewer for Time. A Los Angeles Times reviewer added that Michener wrote “at a pace any glacier would enjoy.”

A Washington Post critic took issue as well with Michener’s casual blending of fact and fiction. Writing about “The Covenant,” he complained that Michener mentioned many well-known South African figures but attributed their actions to his fictional creations. “Imagine a novel prominently featuring Abraham Lincoln but attributing the Gettysburg Address to a fictitious minor character,” the reviewer huffed.

But other critics found value in the historical panoramas, however long, and praised Michener’s ability to bring alive events that “would otherwise be dry as dust.”

While Michener is best known for his fat historical novels, he returned again and again through his long career to social, political and religious themes.

A lifelong Democrat, Michener had a strong sense of social justice that shone through nearly all of his writing, from his admiration for Hawaii’s multiracial society to his indignation at Texas’ shabby treatment of Mexican Americans.

“No other American writer has made the world the subject of his writing with such sympathy for the universal nature of people everywhere,” a reviewer wrote in an appreciative look at Michener’s memoir.

Michener was also an avid student of the American political system. He chronicled his work campaigning for John F. Kennedy in one nonfiction book called “Report of the County Chairman.” In another, “Presidential Library,” he set out arguments for reforming the electoral system.

He used his novel “Space,” published while he was serving on a NASA advisory council, as a platform for advocating scientific research. In several books, he chastised Americans for ignoring public education and the arts. And he explored the issue of doctor-assisted suicide for the terminally ill--a cause he passionately believed in--in “Recessional,” set in a Florida nursing home and published in 1994.

Over the years, Michener also served on various government committees, including the International Broadcasting Board and the State Department’s Advisory Committee on the Arts.

He received numerous awards, most notably the Medal of Freedom in 1977. He taught and lectured all over the world. And he always supported programs for young writers. (He had no children of his own. Though he and his second wife adopted two children, they gave them up after their divorce.)

When speaking to aspiring authors, Michener always emphasized that writing was not as easy as he made it seem.

Even after four decades of success, he said he still woke up in the middle of the night, sweating and fretting about his current project. And he acknowledged a habit of writing out of sequence, taking the easy parts first.

“In the middle of every book, I get panic stricken,” Michener told The Times in 1991. “I think, ‘Who’s going to read this?’ Then I think, ‘Well, there’s nobody on this block who could tell this story any better than I could.’ ”