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Ten years later, his novel Hawaii was published and became an immediate bestseller. In 1949, he took up residence in Honolulu, Hawaii, and became actively involved in Hawaiian civic affairs. Michener won his job back as a textbook editor, and Rodgers and Hammerstein, with Joshua Logan, adapted the story into the musical South Pacific that ran for season after season on Broadway. Brought out in 1947, the book won a Pulitzer Prize.

From his wartime experiences in the Solomon Islands came his first book, Tales of the South Pacific, which he mailed anonymously to his former publishing employer. It was the Navy that introduced Michener to the Pacific. Members of the Awards Council: pioneer TV newscaster Lowell Thomas, famed trial attorney Louis Nizer, and best-selling author James Michener at the 1975 Banquet of the Golden Plate ceremonies in Evansville, Indiana. Subsequently, he found himself editing textbooks for a New York publishing firm, a position that was interrupted by World War II, when Michener joined the U.S. There followed two years of “teaching others how to teach,” first at Colorado State Teachers College, and then as Assistant Visiting Professor of History at Harvard University. Andrew’s University in Scotland and then returned to teach at the George School in Bucks County. Michener entered Swarthmore College as a scholarship student and graduated with highest honors. He traveled across the land by boxcar, worked in carnival shows, and before he was 20 years old, had visited all but three of the States in the Union. The great variety of odd jobs and experiences that followed formed an important part of his early education. Reading fed his wanderlust, and as a teenager, he hitchhiked from coast to coast. His mother and aunt valued books and education, and young Michener immersed himself in the novels of 19th-century masters, Dickens and Balzac. His adopted mother was a hardworking woman who opened her home to many foster children, but life was hard, and James Michener learned early to work hard and do without material possessions.

He was born in New York City in 1907, but over the course of a long life, he was never able to learn who his birth parents were. Michener was adopted by a widow in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. OctoJames Michener as a child in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.Īs an infant, James A.