Michener: A Writer's Journey
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.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.