James Albert Michener

Michener, James Albert (1907–97), U.S. author. His Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific (1947), based on his U.S. Navy experiences in World War II, inspired the famous musical South Pacific (1949) by Rodgers and Hammerstein. He also wrote such ambitious, historically based novels as Hawaii (1959), The Source (1965), Centennial (1974), Chesapeake (1978), Poland (1983), Texas (1985), and Caribbean (1989).