Trivia

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

He knows nothing about his birth parents.

Abandoned as an infant in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

He had survived three near-fatal plane crashes.

He left his entire estate, including the copyrights to his works, to Swarthmore College.

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."

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.

The Library of the University of Northern Colorado, in Greeley, Colorado, his alma mater, is named the James Michener Library in his honor.

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.

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).

Was portrayed by Louis Calhern in Men of the Fighting Lady (1954).

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