The World Is My Home: A Memoir - Softcover

"Michener's own life makes one of his most engaging tales--a classic American success story."--Entertainment Weekly

"The Michener saga is as full of twists as any of his monumental works. . . . His output, his political interests, his patriotic service, his diligence, and the breadth of his readership are matched only by the great nineteenth-century writers whose works he devoured as he grew up--Dickens, Balzac, Mark Twain."--Chicago Tribune

"There are splendid yarns about [Michener's] wartime doings in the South Pacific. There are hilarious cautionary tales about his service on government commissions. There are wonderful inside stories from the publishing business. And always there is Michener himself--analyzing his own character, assessing himself as a writer, chronicling his intellectual life, giving advice to young writers."--The Plain Dealer

"A sweepingly interesting life . . . Whether he's having an epiphany over a campout in New Guinea with head-hunting cannibals or getting politically charged by the melodrama of great opera, James A. Michener's world is a place and a time worth reading about."--The Christian Science Monitor

Universally revered novelist James A. Michener was forty before he decided on writing as a career. Prior to that, he had been an outstanding academic, an editor, and a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander in the Pacific Theater during World War II. His first book, Tales of the South Pacific, won a Pulitzer Prize and became the basis of the award-winning Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific. In the course of the next forty years Mr. Michener wrote such monumental bestsellers as Sayonara, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Hawaii, The Source, Chesapeake, Centennial, Texas, Alaska, Caribbean, and Mexico.

Decorated with America's highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Mr. Michener served on the Advisory Council to NASA, held honorary doctorates in five fields from thirty leading universities, and received a