James Michener

From Philosopedia

Michener, James (3 February 1907? – 16 October 1997)

Michener, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tales of the South Pacific (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948), was one of the few major American authors to publicly acknowledge his secular humanism. In 1989, while a guest lecturer on a Star Princess Cruise shop plowing Alaskan waters, the writer of numerous novels gave a talk to the ship’s auditorium-packed crowd during which he recounted his being a foundling who had never had skates, a wagon, or a sled. His clothes, he said, were always somebody else’s. And he added,

• I never felt in a position to reject anyone. I could be Jewish, part Negro, almost everything else. I am a Humanist, a knee-jerk liberal. I am a Humanist because I think humanity can, with moral guidance, create a decent society.”

In a popular essay he refuted critics who attacked his humanistic credo, one that supported secular and liberal values. In Parade (24 November 1991):

• I was raised as an orphan by a farm couple and took their name. I know nothing of my parents so I never felt in a position to reject anybody. I could be Jewish, part Negro, probably not an Oriental, but almost anything else. This has loomed large in my thoughts. . . . . I decided (after listening to a “talk radio” commentator who abused, vilified, and scorned every noble cause to which I had devoted my entire life that) I was both a Humanist and a liberal, each of the most dangerous and vilified type. I am a Humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, crate a reasonably decent society. I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. I do not believe that pure reason can solve the perceptual problems unless it is modified by poetry and art and social vision. So I am a Humanist. And if you want to charge me with being the most virulent kind—a secular humanist—I accept the accusation. But I do not want to be accused of atheism. No man who loves the book of Deuteronomy and the first chapter of the Epistle of James, as I do, can be totally non-religious. . . .

In The World is My Home: A Memoir (1992), Michener again described his philosophy as being a kind of “liberal humanism” in the vein of Thomas More, Thomas Jefferson, and John Dewey.

Although unsure of his parentage and his birthdate, Michener thought he had been born in New York and had arrived in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, when he was about two weeks old. Mabel Haddock Michener, a poor young widow, he wrote in his autobiography, “made her living by taking in orphaned children and doing other families’ laundry.”

When ninety and suffering from poor health, he chose to discontinue his life-saving kidney dialysis treatment and for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948) of complications following renal failure. John Kings, a longtime friend and assistant, explained Michener’s personally choosing to end his life:

• He felt he had accomplished what he wanted to accomplish in terms of his life’s work. He did not want to suffer a long series of complications.

(See entry for Hernan Rodriguez, who quotes from Michener’s Iberia.)

{CE; HNS2; Thaila Daley Kleinoeder, The Pen Woman, March-April 1998; TYD}