James Michener

Once I overheard my grandmother laughing along with some of my friends as they discussed me. She said, "You ask him the time and he tells you how to build a clock". Unable to deny this, I can only offer in my defense that people trained by the military have a compulsive need to educate everyone around them as practical knowledge is a very good thing to spread around in war.

James A. Michener was forty when he decided on writing as a career and had just come back from war. Prior to that he had been an academic, an editor in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific theater during WWII. He did not simply have a compulsive need to educate those around him, he was a 'patient zero' radiating knowledge and explaining it more passionately than anyone who had ever come before.

His first novel, Tales of the South Pacific won the Pulitzer Prize and became the basis for the award-winning and long-running musical "South Pacific." Over the course of the next forty years, Michener wrote such monumental bestsellers as Sayonara, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Hawaii, The Source, Chesapeake, Centennial, Texas, Alaska and Caribbean.

He was an author I remember my mother reading while I was growing up (first edition hardcover of Alaska still on the shelf). His authtority is that whenever I need to learn as much about a place as possible from a single portable source I turn to Michener. Known for a style of novel that starts with the geological formation of a place and then continues with the story of that place as seen through the lives of multiple generations of the same, or linked, families as the place is first populated by man and then on through the ages. None of his novels - or his non-fiction travelogues - are less than exhaustively thorough.

He became one of the world most popular writers with over forty works published and the accolades, awards, and associations poured in. We lost him in 1997 and since then his influence has continued growing. One of the great Americans of the twentieth century, one of the great patrons of the arts in America and a writer not to be missed whenever one is curious and wants to know almost everything there is to know about a place.