Biography for
James Michener More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

3 February 1907, New York City, New York, USA

Date of Death

16 October 1997, Austin, Texas, USA (kidney failure)

Birth Name

James Albert Michener

Spouse

Mari Yoriko Sabusawa

(ca. 1954 - 1994) (her death)

Trivia

Won Pulitzer Prize for first novel "Tales from the South Pacific" which was the basis of the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II musical South Pacific (1958).

His popular 1971 novel The Drifters was never made into a movie, but the movie rights for the book were among the highest ever paid up to that time.

In 1956, he wrote a pilot about a sailboat plying the South Seas, called "James Michener Presents a South Pacific Adventure," which starred Lyle Bettger. The pilot wasn't picked up by any of the networks, but three years later the concept was reworked and became "Adventures in Paradise" (1959) starring Gardner McKay and ran from 1959-1962.

He had no children. "Not by design, but because that's the way it worked out."

Biography in: "American National Biography". Supplement 1, pp. 410-412. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

He was awarded the American National Medal of the Arts by the National Endowment of the Arts in Washington, DC.

Pictured on a 59¢ USA definitive postage stamp in the Distinguished Americans series, issued 12 May 2008.

He knows nothing about his birth parents.

He was raised with other abandoned children by a poor Quaker widow named Mabel Michener.

Abandoned as an infant in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

He ran as a Democratic candidate for Congress in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1962. Although his campaign was well-fought, he was defeated by his Republican opponent.

Personal Quotes

"I think it's remarkable that a man could write the kind of thing I do - lengthy, intricate, not dependent on sex or violence - and acquire the readership I have." (1980)