“I never select one I haven’t thought about for a long time. “The locales for my books are selected painfully,” Michener says. One of the most remarkable literary careers of the 20th century may well close out in South Florida. Scheduled for publication in 1989, it could be, considering his advanced age (he is 81), Michener’s last. Michener, whose 34 books have sold more than 60 million copies, is at work at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, researching and writing a book on the Caribbean Basin. 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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