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.
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