James Michener would have been 100 years old last month. Christopher Reynolds of the LA Times had a wonderful essay about the man and his work which just appeared in our daily newspaper.
Yet for all the fame and wealth that came his way, I'm here to argue that the author hasn't gotten the credit he deserves.This man — who was born on or about Feb. 3, 1907, and died in 1997 — may have taught more Americans more about the rest of the world than any other writer in his century. And once that teaching made him rich, he plowed the money back into charity, perhaps as much as $100 million, with the lion's share going to the University of Texas at Austin, home of the James A. Michener Center for Writers.
I own sixteen of his books. I concur with Reynolds; as a reader, I learned about the rest of the world through Michener's books. Yes, they were big; yes, they were character-heavy and sometimes confusing; and yes, the writing style wasn't lyrical. But when I read "Iberia" he made me want to see Spain and Portugal. His descriptions of the tells in "The Source" prompted me to want to study anthropology when I went off to college. When I was dating a girl from Johannesburg I read "The Covenant" to learn the bigger picture about her country, the one beyond the headlines full of apartheid and racism.
He was an observer and a storyteller, and he made points subtly. As Reynolds says about "Tales of the South Pacific,"
This book of interconnected stories also marked the beginning of Michener's long exploration of what happens when cultures connect, or fail to. One of the central elements in "South Pacific," though many forget it now, was the journey of nurse Nellie Forbush, who starts out scorning miscegenation and winds up joining a multicultural family.
He had an influence, and what more could an author ask?
Posted by Linkmeister at March 17, 2007 09:45 AM | TrackBack