James Michener

James Michener wrote enormous novels that begin with the geology and end in the present day, and gave away most of the money they made. He was raised by a Quaker foster mother in Pennsylvania in poverty, hitchhiked around the country as a teenager, taught school, and was working as an editor when he joined the navy in the Second World War. Tales of the South Pacific, drawn from his posting there, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and became the musical South Pacific. From Hawaii in 1959 onwards he wrote the doorstop novels he is known for - Centennial, Chesapeake, Poland, Texas, The Source - each covering a place across centuries or millennia, researched with teams of assistants and consultants and running to a thousand pages. The Source, published in 1965, is built around an archaeological dig at a fictional tell in Galilee, working down through the layers from the present to prehistory, and it takes in the Assyrian destruction of the northern kingdom and the deportations that followed. Critics were generally unkind about the prose and the books sold about seventy-five million copies. He gave away more than a hundred million dollars, most of it to universities and writing programmes, and served on public commissions including the one on space policy. He was a foundling and never learned who his parents were, which he mentioned rarely and which several biographers think explains the scale of the giving. The University of Texas has a writing centre named for him. He researched by moving to the place and staying for a year or more, which is why the geology chapters exist at all.

• Lived: 1907 CE – 1997 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: writer