Humanist profile: James A. Michener (1907-1997): American author.

"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 type. 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."

--James A. Michener, Parade magazine, November 24, 1991

American author James A. Michener wrote that he never knew his parents, nor did he know his birthdate or birthplace. According to other sources he was born on February 3, 1907, in New York City and was raised in Doylestown, Pennsylvania by a Quaker widow named Mabel Michener.

Michener (who famously said, "I think young people ought to seek that experience that is going to knock them off center") hitchhiked and traveled across the United States by boxcar, worked in carnival shows and, before the age of twenty, had visited all but three states in the Union.

He graduated with highest honors from Swarthmore College in 1929 and taught English at the George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania. He later earned his master's degree from Colorado State Teachers College and taught history at Harvard University. Michener's writing career began during World War II when, as a lieutenant commander in the Navy, he was assigned to the South Pacific as a naval historian.

Michener wrote more than forty books, many of them highly detailed, sweeping historical sagas set in a particular geographic locale. Among his works are Tales of the South Pacific (which received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1948 and was the basis for the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical), Hawaii, The Drifters, Centennial, Chesapeake, Iberia, Alaska, Texas, and Poland.

In 1962 Michener ran for Congress as a liberal Democrat but lost to the incumbent. In 1968 he served as secretary of the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention, and from 1979 to 1983 he was a member of the Advisory Council to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Other positions included appointments as cultural ambassador to various countries, to the advisory committee of the U.S. Postal Service, and to the International Broadcasting Board. Among the many honors and awards Michener received were honorary doctorates in five different fields and the Medal of Freedom, awarded by President Gerald R. Ford in 1977.

Michener traveled extensively throughout his life to many different parts of the world. He was married three times, had no children, and gave away a great deal of the money he earned--upwards of $100 million--to universities, libraries, museums, and other charitable causes.

Michener lived his final years in Austin, Texas, where he founded a University of Texas MFA program now called the Michener Center for Writers. In October 1997 he ended the daily dialysis treatment that had kept him alive for four years and died not long after at the age of ninety.

In his 1992 autobiography, The World is My Home, Michener wrote: "I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create a reasonably decent society."

Humanism is a rational philosophy informed by science, inspired by art, and motivated by compassion. Affirming the dignity of each human being, it supports liberty and opportunity consonant with social and planetary responsibility. Free of supernaturalism, humanism thus derives the goals of life from human need and interest rather than from theological or ideological abstractions, and asserts that humanity must take responsibility for its own destiny.