If you ever have a few months free and want to read all the works of one author, just jog over to your local library and walk down the fiction aisles looking for the longest row of the fattest books you can find. When you come to them, the author will almost undoubtedly be James Michener.
Michener, an American writer born in 1907, is best known for his gigantic geographical-historical novels that examine a particular area of the world from its geologic past to the present. These include such works as "Hawaii," "The Drifters" (Spain and Portugal), "Alaska," "Texas," "Centennial" (midwestern United States), "Poland," "The Covenant" (South Africa), "Chesapeake," and one of his best in this style, "The Source," (Israel).
Reviewers have occasionally joked about the size of his books, saying, for example, that the 1,100-page "Texas" is so heavy that if it was set down on a coffee table in Texas, it would stay put even if a tornado blew everything around it off to Kansas.
In one remarkable instance of foresight, Michener started work on "Poland" in 1977 after correctly deciding the country would be a focal point of world attention within a decade.
Michener began his first novel while serving as an historian with the United States Navy in the South Pacific during World War II. Though much smaller than his later works, "Tales of the South Pacific" was similar to them in that it is a series of stories with a common theme, in this case, about U.S. troops and Pacific islanders during the war.
The book has been called one of the best fiction works to come out of the Pacific war, and it won Michener the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. It also won him a lot of money after Rodgers and Hammerstein made the book into the Pulitzer-winning play called "South Pacific."
Before he began writing historic epics, Michener also wrote several good shorter books, including "Return to Paradise," about the South Pacific after World War II, "The Bridges at Toko-Ri," about bomber pilots in the Korean War, and "Sayonara," a love story in American-occupied post-World War II Japan.
