In a sense, that’s how Michener wrote his first novel, Tales of the South Pacific, composed in idle moments during World War II, when he was stationed in the South Pacific.

If you can’t do that, you can’t be a writer.” You get up at 4 and write for three hours before going to work. “Although most first novels - most first three novels - are written at 4 a.m. “Every writer finds his own schedule and conforms to it,” Michener says. He never watches television before 9 p.m. He doesn’t drink or eat fatty foods since his heart attack in 1965. His wife, Mari, handles his business affairs. (“I get it done in the morning, or it doesn’t get done”). They also learned that he rises early each day to write from 7 a.m. They learned that he does all his own research, seldom takes notes (“I try to keep it all in my head”), and blocks out his novels in 150-page sections. In the ’60s and ’70s, newspaper stories regularly appeared giving his views on everything from racial equality (for) to the war in Vietnam (for) to pornography (against).Īt PBJC, his fans learned that Michener worries about libel, and runs everything he writes by a raft of attorneys (“I don’t find the ground rules unfair, but they are somewhat restrictive”). Public interest in this intensely private man has always been high. Is it big enough? Is the scale of values great enough? Are the characters going to keep me interested for three years? The Caribbean book started 30 years ago and didn’t work. “I never select one I haven’t thought about for a long time. “The locales for my books are selected painfully,” Michener says. One of the most remarkable literary careers of the 20th century may well close out in South Florida. Scheduled for publication in 1989, it could be, considering his advanced age (he is 81), Michener’s last. Michener, whose 34 books have sold more than 60 million copies, is at work at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, researching and writing a book on the Caribbean Basin. Israel, Colorado, South Africa, the Chesapeake Bay, Texas and Alaska all have served as grist for Michener’s relentless mill.

Gradually, he gave up conventional novels and came to specialize in long (1,000 pages more or less), intricate, sometimes plodding fictionalized histories centered around an intriguing locale. The pattern was established by Hawaii, published in 1959, Michener’s first best seller. Sometime in the late ’60s or early ’70s, James Michener ceased to be a serious writer, at least in the literary sense, and became something else - an industry, his typewriter a factory upon which, with two fingers pecking, he took history and processed it into best-selling novels that also could be used as doorstops and further processed into movies or better yet TV miniseries.

Hawaii michener review