Michener was about 78 when ''Texas'' came out, and his health was becoming precarious, but he immediately took on another huge subject for his next book. When ''Texas'' appeared in 1985, its 1,096 pages made it heftier than any previous Michener work, and its publisher, Random House, said that the first printing of 750,000 copies was the largest in the company's history. He moved to the state from Maryland, where he had spent several years researching and writing ''Chesapeake'' (1978).
In 1981, for example, he accepted an invitation from Gov. Michener often moved to the place he wanted to write about, soaking up atmosphere and collecting detailed information. As a writer, he liked to celebrate the all-American virtues of patriotism, frugality, common sense and courage and to enrich his episodic, educational fiction with the geological origins and prehistory of the territory he staked out as his subject.
Expertly applying his tried-and-true formula, he wove big, old-fashioned narratives involving generations of fictional families as they moved through expertly documented events in history. Michener was often scorned by critics even as he achieved a huge and appreciative following. 1 best sellers in the half-century history of the weekly New York Times best-seller list. As of late 1992, he was one of only eight authors who had written six or more No.
Michener moved from his brief tales of people to his monumental sagas of places - beginning with ''Hawaii'' in 1959 - that he became one of those rare writers whose books are snatched up by the book clubs and become almost automatic best sellers even before they hit the book stores. Although it later became a classic Broadway musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein and a successful film, it was not a best seller at first. ''Tales of the South Pacific,'' a collection of stories he began while he was in the Navy during World War II, was his first published fiction and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948.
0 kommentar(er)
