Conversations with Michener

by Lawrence Grobel

After successfully publishing his interviews with Truman Capote and Marlon Brando as full length books, Grobel approached author James A. Michener as his next subject, and wound up taping their regular discussions over a 17 year period, right up until the last week of Michener’s life. The result is the most comprehensive of all Grobel’s “conversation” books. Michener, who didn’t start writing novels until he was 40, was a true citizen of the world, who lived in and foresaw the future of countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Poland, Japan, Spain, Hungary, Mexico, Israel, and the U.S. His books—like Hawaii, The Source, Iberia, Sayonara, and Tales of the South Pacific--sold millions of copies and many were made into films or TV miniseries. Conversations with Michener is as relevant today as it was prescient when it first appeared in 1999. Now available as an e-book.

290 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 30, 2012

About the author

Lawrence Grobel (www.lawrencegrobel.com) is a novelist, journalist, biographer, poet and teacher. Five of his 32 books have been singled out as Best Books of the Year by Publisher’s Weekly and many have appeared on Best Seller lists. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. PEN gave his Conversations with Capote a Special Achievement Award. The Syndicat Francais de la Critique de Cinema awarded his Al Pacino their Prix Litteraire as the Best International Book of 2008. James A. Michener called his biography, The Hustons, “a masterpiece.” His The Art of the Interview is used as a text in many journalism schools. Writer’s Digest called him “a legend among journalists.” Joyce Carol Oates dubbed him “The Mozart of Interviewers” and Playboy singled him out as “The Interviewer’s Interviewer” after publishing his interviews with Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton, Henry Fonda and Marlon Brando.
He has written for dozens of magazines and has been a Contributing Editor for Playboy, Movieline, World (New Zealand), and Trendy (Poland). He served in the Peace Corps, teaching at the Ghana Institute of Journalism; created the M.F.A. in Professional Writing for Antioch University; and taught in the English Department at UCLA for ten years. Since 2007 he has served as a jury member at the annual Camerimage Film Festival in Poland. He has appeared on CNN, The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Charlie Rose Show, NPR’s The Treatment, Marc Maron”s WTF and Adam Carolla’s podcasts, and in two documentaries, Salinger and Al Pacino’s Wilde Salome. His book, You, Talking to Me, highlights the lessons he’s learned from interviewing. His memoir, You Show Me Yours, takes him from the streets of Brooklyn to Marlon Brando’s island in Tahiti. Yoga? No, Shmoga! is his satirical take on staying healthy through stretching. His fiction includes 2 novels (Catch a Fallen Star, Begin Again Finnegan), a novella (The Black Eyes of Akbah), and 3 books of short stories (The Narcissist, Stuck, and Schemers, Dreamers, Cheaters, Believers). His most recent books are a memoir of his three years in the Peace Corps (Turquoise), and HUSTLE: The Making of a Freelance Writer. His books are all available on Amazon and on his website. He is married to the artist Hiromi Oda and they have two daughters.

Reviews

[Gregg Narber · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read many of James Michener's books many years ago and did not much admire them (though read them I did). Sort of "history lite" without much in the way of character development or much else that makes for great literature. These interviews, however, reveal a man who thought deeply about issues like racism, women's rights, education, literature and much more, and with whom I found a lot of common cause. I guess in today's USA many would call him a "libtard". His discussions of disturbing trends in American culture, about which he is very pessimistic, seem to have come true in many ways, at least in the present moment, decades before he seemed to predict them. He would be appalled. So I read these extensive interviews with great interest. Enough so that I may even go ahead and read TEXAS and MEXICO which came out after I sort of abandoned reading him. Interesting thoughts of a thoughtful (and very philanthropic) man.

[Rex Fuller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was taken from notes of the author’s conversations with Michener for almost twenty years and reveals fascinating details about him. At eighty five and a half years of age, Michener gave away his last fifteen million dollars (for his writers program at the University of Texas). He had already donated his art and recording collections and his manuscripts and papers. He also funded an art museum in Bucks County Pennsylvania and paid the college tuition for numerous needful students. The valuation of the total giving was well over a hundred million. For the rest of his life he would rely on income from future books--four were in various stages of production. It was still a gutsy move. He lived to be ninety. One of the drawbacks of that is to see friends die, Hemingway and Capote among those, but he had a great many, also including William F. Buckley, Walter Cronkite, Art Buchwald, Norman Mailer, Joe DiMaggio, and Gore Vidal. He had the traditional liberal's open heart (trusting the government to do good), myopia (the sudden collapse of Soviet socialism shocked him), and patriotism (he led the successful campaign to withdraw from UNESCO when it became anti-American). Probably the best part of this work is that the reader can just ignore who is being interviewed and learn a tremendous amount from the content, including a vast reading list of books mentioned, suggestions for writers, insights into many historical incidents, and often prescient views on the future we have since experienced. Very readable and entertaining.

[Koduvayur Harikrishnan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one fabulous way of writing an autobiography - of one of the greatest authors America has produced. An author of some 4o books, James Michener (1907-1997) started writing in his forties! There is a third association between Michener and the number 40 - he received as many doctorates in his lifetime. In the last three years of his life, when he was underging treatment for kidney failure, he produced three major books! His very first book - Tales of the South Pacific (New York, Macmillan, 1947) earned him a Pulitzer Prize. The Nobel Prize eluded him though (I personally feel the Nobel Prize lost a fair bit of its sheen in the process - although Michener's own reaction to a question on the topic (pages 143-144) is a classic in itself).
Michener's books fall mainly into the category of Historical Fiction (he disliked this terminology, as per this book!). Coming from Doylestown, a small town in Pennsylvania, Michener never looked back after his first success as a writer. His most loved book is Hawaii, and like this one, many of his books are huge, running close to 1000 pages. As he himself points out in this book, if you stay with his book for the first hundred pages where humans rarely make an appearance, you will be hooked. Having read almost all his works, I can endorse this wholeheartedly!
Lawrence Grobel and Michener were friends for a very long time, and the present book is the result of ten years of conversations between the two of them. The 'Q's and 'A's have been very cleverly organised into 13 remarkable chapters. But at the end, there is this Afterword by Michener, which is truly profound.
The book is full of wisdom - nuggets of incredible insights into life. It is a must read for everyone, whether already a Michener fan, or totally unaware of Michener the author, for those interested in getting a glimpse into Michener's genius, for students of research into literature, and above all, by every single aspiring author. Oh, how I loved your books Jim, and how I miss you now. I can, of course, never forgive you for not doing a book on India!

[David Highton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read 4 of Michener’s major sagas in 1980s and so I was interested in this book by Grobel based on interviews in the 80s and 90s - interesting conversations ranging over a whole range of subjects. I may have to summon up the energy for some more 1200 pagers!