Talking with Michener

James Michener's vast work has intrigued millions of readers. Popularizing history, he wrote extensively about travel and covered broad areas of America in books such as Centennial, Texas, Hawaii, Alaska, and Chesapeake. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his first book, Tales of the South Pacific, which he wrote at the age of forty, and his books were made into television mini-series, movies, and musicals. In conversations that took place between 1980 and October 1997, days before his death, Michener met with Lawrence Grobel at Michener's homes in Florida, Maine, and Texas, as well as in New York and Los Angeles. The two discussed topics of both a personal and professional nature and touched on subjects Michener avoided in his own memoir. The product of these revealing discussions is Talking with Michener, the first full-length book of in-depth interviews with the famed writer. In the thirteen chapters of the book, Michener explores sex, love, pornography, politics abortion, AIDS, plagiarism, sports, the current state of publishing, and the status of the artist in society. To Grobel, he reveals many personal milestones and struggles--his dialysis; the death of his wife Mari; his service in the war; his travels to the Antarctica and to Pearl Harbor on the 50th anniversary of the bombing; and his philanthropy totaling $120 million. Speaking of literary matters, he tells how he wrote such sweeping novels, why he chose some subjects and avoided others, and how he might write a historical novel about California. He analyzes each of his books, chooses his favorites, and discusses his strengths and weaknesses as a writer. To accompany the chapters that cover the writer's life and work, Grobel has written an intimate introduction about his long relationship with Michener, and Michener interviews himself in a revealing afterword. Through the pages of Talking with Michener, Grobel affords Michener's many fans a close portrait of unexcelled depth and discovery. Lawrence Grobel is a novelist and writer from Los Angeles. Among his honors are a fiction fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a P. E. N. Special Achievement Award for his book Conversations with Capote. His articles and interviews have appeared in Playboy, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Newsday, Reader's Digest, Movieline, and Entertainment Weekly.