When I was
a young teenager in the mid-1960s, the young adult genre of books was a
mish-mash of Nancy Drew, Sue Barton, The Hardy Boys, Little Women, Treasure
Island and David Copperfield. Once we teens had devoured all of those books,
including Black Stallion, Johnny Tremain and I Capture the Castle, we seemed to
move quickly and deliberately into books written for adults. We read John
Steinbeck’s Mice and Men, Conrad Richter’s A Light in the Forest, and Ray
Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. We carried dog-eared copies of Betty Smith’s A Tree
Grows in Brooklyn, Pearl Buck’s Good Earth, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and
Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
One
day, when he was 16, Steven Berry was handed a copy of James Michener’s Hawaii.
Massive chapters, pages of descriptive prose, and centuries of history unfolded
for him and a generation of older teens who were ready to devour books that
opened up the world. Berry writes on his website that Michener is probably his
favorite author and the one who made the greatest impression on him as a
writer. It led him to write the introduction that appears in thirty-three of
Michener’s books republished in paperback by Penguin Random House’s Dial Press,
including Tales of the South Pacific (first published in 1947) and Miracle in
Seville (Michener’s last book published, in 1995.)
James Michener’s memoir, The World
is My Home was published in 1992, five years before his death. It’s a tome to
be reckoned with, spanning nearly 90 years from his birth in Buck’s County,
Pennsylvania in 1907 through some of the last of his novels written before he
turned 85. At 512 pages, The World is My Home is neatly split into 14 chapters
– seven about his life before he became a writer and seven after that. He
writes of the early years of – when he was seemingly abandoned as an infant and
adopted by a widowed Quaker, Mabel Michener. In fact, he never knew his actual
birth date, nor the names of his biological parents. Years later, in order to
obtain a U.S. passport, he would have to apply for a birth certificate, and it
included a lengthy legal process with estimated and historical information
about his birth.
Although he grew up in poverty,
Michener managed to attend Swarthmore College on scholarship after graduating
from high school. He earned a graduate degree in northern Colorado and became a
college teacher. He guest lectured at Harvard, leaving that position to become
an editor of textbooks. As a Quaker, he was sent to the South Pacific during
World War II as a historian for the Navy from 1942-1946. He was discharged
right before his 40th birthday.
And
that is where the first seven chapters end and his writing career began - with
his Tales of the South Pacific. He began notes about the stories, observations,
and impressions that were made on him in the Navy. Tales of the South Pacific
was published the year after he left the Navy and it was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize for fiction in 1948. The Broadway musical opened in 1949 (and won the
Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1950) and two film versions were released in 1958
and 2001. The 1958 big-screen film was nominated for three academy awards,
winning best picture for sound. The 2001 version was made for television and
starred Glenn Close and Harry Connick, Jr.
I read a dog-eared mass paperback
edition of Michener’s first novel The Fires of Spring (1947); (Tales of the
South Pacific is considered a book of short stories). I was in my early 20s,
traveling on rapid transit along the rail running along the East Bay of San
Francisco. I devoured that book during my work commute. It is the
semi-autobiographical story of Michener’s own life. David Harper, a young
orphan who grows up in a rural poorhouse, drifts as a young man, spends time as
a scam artist at a carnival, attends college and eventually becomes a
journalist and writer in the early years of the depression.. The book is a true
bildungsroman, the German word for a coming of age novel (a word known to
librarians as it is a descriptor for a whole genre of novels.)
A few months ago, I was remembering
with nostalgia those books I read in my late teens and early adulthood. I
wondered if I would still enjoy the stories of angst, poverty, despair and
political upheaval that they represented. Among them were Somerset Maugham’s Of
Human Bondage, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, and
Michener’s Fires of Spring. I decided to reread Fires of Spring and I stumbled
upon the entire republished collection of Michener’s works by the Dial Press.
Publication began in fact, in 1987 with Fires of Spring. It continued with the reprinting in 2016 of
Michener’s commentary on the rashness of our electoral system, a work of
non-fiction, The Presidential Lottery. In 1968 Michener was a Democrat elector
in the Electoral College in Pennsylvania, having run for public office himself
in the early 60s. What he witnessed as the possibility of disaster in trusting
our system to the Electoral College drove him to warn Americans about this
“reckless gamble.”
In his memoir The World is My Home,
James Michener wrote “mostly I want to be remembered by that row of solid books
that rest on library shelves throughout the world.” Our shelves held about a dozen of Michener’s
books, once new but greatly loved. We’ve replaced those and many other with the
newest Dial Press editions and are spotlighting them in a “Rediscover James
Michener” display. They include Centennial, Hawaii, the Source, Texas, Bridges
at Toko-Ri and about a dozen others. You’ll find the display on top of the NEW
FICTION shelves in the library. I hope you will re-experience your favorite
Michener book or find a Michener treasure to love for the first time.
