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Literary Reflections
Pulitzer Prize-winning author James A. Michener has been writing for over seven decades. This book presents Michener's analysis of his own writing and that of his peers--his reflections, remembrances, and stories of his youthful encounters with the era's notable personages.
For any who do not know him, this is their chance to meet this extraordinary man. For his millions of fans, this is the chance to know him better.
For any who do not know him, this is their chance to meet this extraordinary man. For his millions of fans, this is the chance to know him better.
290 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published November 1, 1993
2 people are currently reading
214 people want to read
About the author
James A. Michener
522 books3,588 followersJames Albert Michener is best known for his sweeping multi-generation historical fiction sagas, usually focusing on and titled after a particular geographical region. His first novel,
Tales of the South Pacific
, which inspired the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Toward the end of his life, he created the Journey Prize, awarded annually for the year's best short story published by an emerging Canadian writer; founded an MFA program now, named the Michener Center for Writers, at the University of Texas at Austin; and made substantial contributions to the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, best known for its permanent collection of Pennsylvania Impressionist paintings and a room containing Michener's own typewriter, books, and various memorabilia.
Michener's entry in Who's Who in America says he was born on Feb. 3, 1907. But he said in his 1992 memoirs that the circumstances of his birth remained cloudy and he did not know just when he was born or who his parents were.
Toward the end of his life, he created the Journey Prize, awarded annually for the year's best short story published by an emerging Canadian writer; founded an MFA program now, named the Michener Center for Writers, at the University of Texas at Austin; and made substantial contributions to the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, best known for its permanent collection of Pennsylvania Impressionist paintings and a room containing Michener's own typewriter, books, and various memorabilia.
Michener's entry in Who's Who in America says he was born on Feb. 3, 1907. But he said in his 1992 memoirs that the circumstances of his birth remained cloudy and he did not know just when he was born or who his parents were.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 26, 2014
Requiem for an Old Master
Is James Michener old fashioned? Sure, but he still has plenty to say, not just to novice writers but to all of us.
James Michener isn’t so popular anymore and that’s too bad. We move at a much faster pace now than when Michener was writing and it’s daunting, picking up a Michener book and deciding to read it or not. His books are tomes, thousand-page doorstops, and readable, oh so readable, and once we surrender to their size, it maybe doesn’t take as much time to get through them as we thought it would.
Michener’s last work, Literary Reflections, published, actually re-published in 1993, it was originally published in 1983, is more accessible. It’s non-fiction and short enough for anyone wanting to get a taste of Michener’s style and his storytelling. It’s 290 pages and is written in large type. (By 1993, Michener’s fans were mostly old folks, Michener, too. Born in 1907, he lived to be 90 years old.)
The book is what it calls itself in its title – reflections, and contains some marvelous writing. There’s some autobiographical stuff, which includes some lessons for young writers, some of the lessons spelled out, some inferred.
Here’s some Michener advisories, for you self-publishing youngsters:
Make the opening chapters of a novel difficult, so as to discourage certain readers.
Got it, kids?
Here’s one not easy to apply but worth applying:
Research should be done on the iceburg principle: one-tenth visible in the finished work, nine-tenths submerged but available to give the whole stability and a sense of force.
And not said, but inferred: Wait.
Michener didn’t feel he was ready to write fiction until he was forty years of age, but he didn’t squander those early years. He was preparing himself, whether he knew it or not. He wasn’t going to write a “debut novel” until he had a mature understanding of what a novel was, which is not to say that authors have to wait until they’re forty years old to write their story, or that they should be writing them in their early twenties, either.
The book contains the short story, Who is Virgil T. Fry, a story that helped launch Michener’s career and that also has something to say to a novice writer: A thoughtful short story doesn’t require a load of ambiguity, and I do mean load, or a twist at the end. Stuff it with too much ambiguity and it becomes muddled. Put a twist at the end and the reader maybe hurries past the beginning and the middle.
The most entertaining piece of the book is Michener recounting his feud with a man named Albert C. Barnes. Barnes was irascible and reclusive. He made a fortune at an early age with a concoction that prevented certain types of blindness in infants, then marketed it brilliantly and got out just before the 1929 stock market crash. With his fortune, he amassed an art collection and as a kind of reverse-snob, he wouldn’t allow anyone connected with a university or a museum to see it.
The young Michener, a student at the nearby and detested Swarthmore College, heard about the collection and conning Barnes, Michener got in to see the art. The con wasn’t much more than a prank, really, and afterwards and with his chicanery discovered by Barnes and with folks thinking it was funny, what the young student had done to the curmudgeon, the feud was on, whether Michener wanted it or not. It was an intellectual, not a violent feud, and Michener, recalling it so many years after, seemed more bemused than angry. When Barnes died, in an inevitable, fiery auto crash beneath a stoplight, (inevitable because Barnes had vehemently opposed the installation of the light and sped daily through it, whether it was green or red,) Michener was given the opportunity to publicly attack his adversary and demurred, a gallant gesture, considering how persistently and publicly Barnes had ragged Michener.
The last part of the book deals with Michener’s involvement with three very popular and important twentieth-century American books and with the people who wrote them ─ Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, and Margaret Mitchell’s only book, the one about the Civil War and the post-war South.
I’ve never read Gone with the Wind, and never, I confess, and despite my affinity for Turner Classic Movies, watched the movie from beginning to end, because my impression of the story has always been that it glorified the Old South with its peculiar institution, its abomination. Michener, while praising the book, verifies my opinion of it, thereby reconfirming my lack of interest in reading it.
In the early 1950s, Hemingway had just published what was maybe his worst book, Across the River and Into the Trees. The critics hated it, some saying it was so bad, it was the end of Hemingway. Life Magazine didn’t think Hemingway was done and went ahead and dedicated an entire issue to introducing Hemingway’s next book, The Old Man, complete with a laudatory introduction by Michener. It was a daring gamble, a failed writer, a magazine reinventing its own format for a single issue and the results? 5 million copies sold in 2 days, tens of thousands more in book form (and still selling today,) a movie starring Spencer Tracy, a Pulitzer Prize, a Nobel Prize and a place in American publishing history. Not bad for an over-the-hill writer. And with the success of the venture, Life Magazine decided to do it again with another author. The second time wasn’t nearly as successful as the first, although it did pretty well, and the author?
Michener.
Michener gives us an honest accounting of Hemingway, whom Michener knew.
In Michener’s portrayal, Hemingway could be irascible, although he was no Alfred C. Barnes. Hemingway was more disdainful and judgmental than curmudgeonly and if you loved how Hemingway wrote about bulls and the men who fought them, you’ll love the section of Literary Reflections that talks about Hemingway writing about the bullfights. Michener knew something about bullfighting (it’s present in at least a couple of his sagas,) and his account of Hemingway on the bulls is nearly as good as what Hemingway wrote.
That third book, In Cold Blood, was a monster hit for the author, Truman Capote, and was as controversial as the author. The book invented the crime-novel genre, or the true crime genre, something Capote called the non-fiction novel. It’s a true story written in novel format and if some of the conversations are not verbatim, they at least maintain the character of the folks talking.
Like so many others readers, I was enthralled with this book and haunted afterward. (It has been reviewed more than 8500 times, combined, on Goodreads and Amazon and judging by a perusal of those reviews, I’m not the only one enthralled and haunted.) What’s most disturbing about the murders is the randomness of it all, how the killers chose their victims, and what’s galling is not so much how the Clutter family was murdered but why. It was done ostensibly for money, although there was little there to be taken. They died for their ordinariness, their banality (in the estimation of the killers.) The killers, losers, had an attitude ─ the Clutters lived meaningless lives and therefore had no reason to go on living. The brutal fact is, though, these were good folks living good lives and it’s outrageous, the presumptuousness of the murderers, how they took it upon themselves to decide thumbs up or thumbs down. And how they laughed about it afterward.
Michener is more concerned here with Capote and with Capote’s talent as a writer and with how much more Capote might have accomplished, had he fully harnessed his undeniable brilliance. Too often, Capote seemed more interested in being the flaky writer, the flamboyant artist, an Oscar Wilde, than with proving it with pencil and paper. His output was sparse compared to say, Michener, or Hemingway. Conversely, Capote never did write his own Across the River and into the Trees.
Everything he wrote was a gem.
Is James Michener old fashioned? Sure, but he still has plenty to say, not just to novice writers but to all of us.
James Michener isn’t so popular anymore and that’s too bad. We move at a much faster pace now than when Michener was writing and it’s daunting, picking up a Michener book and deciding to read it or not. His books are tomes, thousand-page doorstops, and readable, oh so readable, and once we surrender to their size, it maybe doesn’t take as much time to get through them as we thought it would.
Michener’s last work, Literary Reflections, published, actually re-published in 1993, it was originally published in 1983, is more accessible. It’s non-fiction and short enough for anyone wanting to get a taste of Michener’s style and his storytelling. It’s 290 pages and is written in large type. (By 1993, Michener’s fans were mostly old folks, Michener, too. Born in 1907, he lived to be 90 years old.)
The book is what it calls itself in its title – reflections, and contains some marvelous writing. There’s some autobiographical stuff, which includes some lessons for young writers, some of the lessons spelled out, some inferred.
Here’s some Michener advisories, for you self-publishing youngsters:
Make the opening chapters of a novel difficult, so as to discourage certain readers.
Got it, kids?
Here’s one not easy to apply but worth applying:
Research should be done on the iceburg principle: one-tenth visible in the finished work, nine-tenths submerged but available to give the whole stability and a sense of force.
And not said, but inferred: Wait.
Michener didn’t feel he was ready to write fiction until he was forty years of age, but he didn’t squander those early years. He was preparing himself, whether he knew it or not. He wasn’t going to write a “debut novel” until he had a mature understanding of what a novel was, which is not to say that authors have to wait until they’re forty years old to write their story, or that they should be writing them in their early twenties, either.
The book contains the short story, Who is Virgil T. Fry, a story that helped launch Michener’s career and that also has something to say to a novice writer: A thoughtful short story doesn’t require a load of ambiguity, and I do mean load, or a twist at the end. Stuff it with too much ambiguity and it becomes muddled. Put a twist at the end and the reader maybe hurries past the beginning and the middle.
The most entertaining piece of the book is Michener recounting his feud with a man named Albert C. Barnes. Barnes was irascible and reclusive. He made a fortune at an early age with a concoction that prevented certain types of blindness in infants, then marketed it brilliantly and got out just before the 1929 stock market crash. With his fortune, he amassed an art collection and as a kind of reverse-snob, he wouldn’t allow anyone connected with a university or a museum to see it.
The young Michener, a student at the nearby and detested Swarthmore College, heard about the collection and conning Barnes, Michener got in to see the art. The con wasn’t much more than a prank, really, and afterwards and with his chicanery discovered by Barnes and with folks thinking it was funny, what the young student had done to the curmudgeon, the feud was on, whether Michener wanted it or not. It was an intellectual, not a violent feud, and Michener, recalling it so many years after, seemed more bemused than angry. When Barnes died, in an inevitable, fiery auto crash beneath a stoplight, (inevitable because Barnes had vehemently opposed the installation of the light and sped daily through it, whether it was green or red,) Michener was given the opportunity to publicly attack his adversary and demurred, a gallant gesture, considering how persistently and publicly Barnes had ragged Michener.
The last part of the book deals with Michener’s involvement with three very popular and important twentieth-century American books and with the people who wrote them ─ Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, and Margaret Mitchell’s only book, the one about the Civil War and the post-war South.
I’ve never read Gone with the Wind, and never, I confess, and despite my affinity for Turner Classic Movies, watched the movie from beginning to end, because my impression of the story has always been that it glorified the Old South with its peculiar institution, its abomination. Michener, while praising the book, verifies my opinion of it, thereby reconfirming my lack of interest in reading it.
In the early 1950s, Hemingway had just published what was maybe his worst book, Across the River and Into the Trees. The critics hated it, some saying it was so bad, it was the end of Hemingway. Life Magazine didn’t think Hemingway was done and went ahead and dedicated an entire issue to introducing Hemingway’s next book, The Old Man, complete with a laudatory introduction by Michener. It was a daring gamble, a failed writer, a magazine reinventing its own format for a single issue and the results? 5 million copies sold in 2 days, tens of thousands more in book form (and still selling today,) a movie starring Spencer Tracy, a Pulitzer Prize, a Nobel Prize and a place in American publishing history. Not bad for an over-the-hill writer. And with the success of the venture, Life Magazine decided to do it again with another author. The second time wasn’t nearly as successful as the first, although it did pretty well, and the author?
Michener.
Michener gives us an honest accounting of Hemingway, whom Michener knew.
In Michener’s portrayal, Hemingway could be irascible, although he was no Alfred C. Barnes. Hemingway was more disdainful and judgmental than curmudgeonly and if you loved how Hemingway wrote about bulls and the men who fought them, you’ll love the section of Literary Reflections that talks about Hemingway writing about the bullfights. Michener knew something about bullfighting (it’s present in at least a couple of his sagas,) and his account of Hemingway on the bulls is nearly as good as what Hemingway wrote.
That third book, In Cold Blood, was a monster hit for the author, Truman Capote, and was as controversial as the author. The book invented the crime-novel genre, or the true crime genre, something Capote called the non-fiction novel. It’s a true story written in novel format and if some of the conversations are not verbatim, they at least maintain the character of the folks talking.
Like so many others readers, I was enthralled with this book and haunted afterward. (It has been reviewed more than 8500 times, combined, on Goodreads and Amazon and judging by a perusal of those reviews, I’m not the only one enthralled and haunted.) What’s most disturbing about the murders is the randomness of it all, how the killers chose their victims, and what’s galling is not so much how the Clutter family was murdered but why. It was done ostensibly for money, although there was little there to be taken. They died for their ordinariness, their banality (in the estimation of the killers.) The killers, losers, had an attitude ─ the Clutters lived meaningless lives and therefore had no reason to go on living. The brutal fact is, though, these were good folks living good lives and it’s outrageous, the presumptuousness of the murderers, how they took it upon themselves to decide thumbs up or thumbs down. And how they laughed about it afterward.
Michener is more concerned here with Capote and with Capote’s talent as a writer and with how much more Capote might have accomplished, had he fully harnessed his undeniable brilliance. Too often, Capote seemed more interested in being the flaky writer, the flamboyant artist, an Oscar Wilde, than with proving it with pencil and paper. His output was sparse compared to say, Michener, or Hemingway. Conversely, Capote never did write his own Across the River and into the Trees.
Everything he wrote was a gem.
May 2, 2025
I've really liked the few Michener books, tomes really, that I read, now long ago, but could get into this one. I was looking for writer insights, but didn't find that much that I found helpful, to the point that I wondered what "literary" (as in the title) meant. The book struck me more as, loosely, autobiographical, with a lot of filler.
May 24, 2025
Learned so much about what made Michener a writer and so interesting. He really didn't start writing his books until his late thirties. He highlights and writes of several authors he admired, and the best part was the sonnet he wrote at the end
October 14, 2009
I was less interested in Michener's opinion and encounters with Hemingway than his tales as a student and young writer in Philadelphia. Interesting anecdotes about the Main Line, Swarthmore College, an editor at JB Lippincott, visits to the art collection of John G. Johnson (now in the art museum) and the library of of A. Edward Newton. I was also surprised to read that Philadelphia Quakers in the 1930s were still using the "thee" form of address. The story of Dr. Albert Barnes's (the Barnes collection) vendetta against Michener is astounding--- Barnes was a crazy man! Very enjoyable read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews