This was 1948, sixty years ago. I remember the original book, its brown cover with an island and a warship passing by. The war that is now almost beyond living memory was still very fresh. Men and also women who had spent years in uniform had only recently returned to civilian life, and the book, the stories in it even if exotic, was part of their memories. The author, James A. Michener, was unknown. He had been in the Navy and had written at night during the war, two fingers on an old typewriter, writing on the backs of envelopes and letters about the people and events he had somehow seen. It was as if he were unwrapping a souvenir of those days, but instead of a Japanese sword or belt buckle or gold tooth it was a kind of elegiac song that rang with distant names, some historic and nearly forgotten: Pitcairn Island, Tulagi, Bougainville, the Treasuries, Cape Esperance, and others still carrying the electric charge of legend-Guadalcanal, the Solomons, the Slot.

Michener had been a lieutenant commander and older than the others at a time when a pilot in his mid-twenties could be called Pappy. He'd been born in 1907, perhaps in New York, but in fact where and to whom is not known-he was abandoned by his parents as a child and raised by a poor widow in Doylestown, Bucks County, in Pennsylvania. He was the poorest boy in school, with holes in his shoes, but also one of the brightest. His foster mother took in laundry and did sewing to earn a living, to survive, and Michener spent periods in the local poorhouse when they could not get by. He was one of those Dickensian figures or like Dickens himself, annealed by poverty, made good-hearted and true by it. He had gotten a scholarship to Swarthmore and, after graduating with honors, went on to teach and earn higher degrees. He had traveled on a shoestring-hitchhiked and ridden boxcars all around the country, to every state except three, he said, before he entered high school. Assistant visiting professor of history at Harvard was where he ended up before taking a job editing textbooks in New York.

Then came Pearl Harbor. Michener was married and almost thirty-five years old at the time, but he was in the naval reserve and in 1943 was called up. He went to the South Pacific as a naval historian. It took days or weeks to get anywhere, the distances were immense. Eisenhower, then a brigadier general in plans, had been summoned to General Marshall's office a few days after the war started to hear a grave outline of the situation in the Pacific, which the Japanese were in the process of overrunning with little to stop them. Marshall asked him a single question: "What should be our general line of action?" Eisenhower, newly arrived at headquarters, was unfamiliar with the current plans and had no staff. He went off and in a few hours returned with his typed recommendations. The Philippines would probably fall, he assumed, although all of the Asian peoples would be watching to see how hard we fought. The single most important thing was that Australia must hold as a main base of operations, and the long line of communications to it had to be maintained at any cost. In this they must not fail.

Marshall said simply, "I agree with you."

There would be bitter, hard-fought battles on one island after another, but it was essentially a naval and air war unlike anything that had preceded it. Talescaptured the feeling of that war and the locale, although Michener apologized at the beginning of the book that he would not be able to describe it, the great ocean, the reefs and waves, the coconut palms and jungle, the endless waiting, the way things actually were-he wanted to, but characters, individuals, kept intruding and taking over-the old Tonkinese woman selling human heads in the Hebrides, the coast watcher known as the Remittance Man and what happened to him, the French planter Emile de Becque, the beautiful American nurse Nellie Forbush.

The book was not a best seller. It sold about twenty-five thousand copies, but won the Pulitzer Prize and afterward became the musical that raised it and the characters in it to that level where art becomes history and Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler are the same as real people, just as Anna Karenina and Willy Loman are. How this happens we do not know. They are wonderfully conceived, as is their world, and we come to accept them completely.

Willy Loman is closer to the mark than it might seem, for Michener belongs to the generation of honest, sincere voices tinged with some poetry that included Steinbeck and Arthur Miller. The musical swept the Tonys-cast, score, director-and ran for years. It also won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for drama. The book ended up selling more than two million copies.

Tales of the South Pacific is just that, a collection of stories with occasional reappearing characters apart from the narrator, the unnamed Michener himself. It's written in stiff, almost amateurish prose, old newsman prose, and has cardboard-like scenes, awkward and sometimes corny, but it is also woven with history and the kind of descriptions only a kindly, humane eye would see. Most important, it has color, freshness, and the power of names. The reader is filled with a yearning to have been there or even to go, to see Norfolk Island, where, generations later, the survivors of the Bounty still lived, to see the far-off beaches, the seas, the skins of gold.

He was a storyteller, Michener said humbly of himself. Though he had been an editor at Macmillan and went back to his job after the war, he submitted the manuscript to them anonymously. Writing was hard for him, he later said, but he went on to write more than forty books, many of them best sellers, history related through fiction and carefully researched. His big success after Tales was Hawaii, on which he worked for seven years, often twelve hours a day. It was an immediate best seller. He wrote The Source, Chesapeake, Alaska, Texas, The Covenant, and Centennial, among many others, always haunted, he said, by his years of poverty that had had a powerful impact.

When you go back and look at a photograph of Michener taken when he was in the Navy, you see an ordinary, serious face, it could be a newspaperman's face, a face with evidence of sobriety and perseverance.

He moved to Hawaii in 1949 with his second wife, an aspiring writer, but later they divorced and he married a second-generation Japanese-American who had been in one of the detention camps during the war. The marriage lasted until her death, thirty-nine years later. There were no children. Though money poured in, Michener always lived, he said, as if he had retired on a small pension and some savings. He gave away an estimated and astonishing $100,000,000, much of it to colleges and universities. He was what you hope for in a man, he had gotten his education, he said, entirely through scholarships at public expense and felt the obligation to give something back. He gave to Swarthmore, the University of Iowa, and the University of Texas, as well as designating income from certain books to go directly to charities.

Michener spent his last years in Austin, at the University of Texas. He had been in poor health-hip trouble, a heart bypass some years earlier, and then kidney failure that led to daily dialysis. His wife had died. He had done "the decent thing" and gotten rid of some of the money, he said. In a characteristically modest way, he said that he had accomplished what he had wanted to accomplish in life. He had been on dialysis for four years and was ninety when he unhooked himself from the machine and died.

He was a lifelong Democrat. He had campaigned for JFK in 1962 and even run unsuccessfully for Congress in a staunch Republican district. He had medals and awards, had traveled the world and served on councils and boards. From the beginning, what marked him was a great humanity. He thought of all men as brothers, they had a soul like his.

James Salter is the author of the novels Solo Faces, Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime, The Arm of Flesh (revised as Cassada), and The Hunters; the memoirs Gods of Tin and Burning the Days; and the collection Dusk and Other Stories, which won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award. He lives in Colorado and on Long Island.

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