Introduction
One of the earliest memories of James A. Michener is of the road that ran in front of his house in Doylestown, Pa. To the east, it ended abruptly at a farm about a half-mile away. To the west, it ran forever, 'leading to strange places and wondrous adventures that I could not even imagine.'
To young Michener, the road was magic. Often when he walked home from the farm after finishing his work harvesting asparagus, he would visualize himself continuing to walk westward 'toward the wonders that my geography books assured me existed.'
In his memoirs, The World Is My Home (1992), he remembered, 'I always saw myself as traveling alone, moving into one great adventure after another, and never did my mind tire of that imaginary exercise.'
Back home under the light of a kerosene lamp, he would pore over maps and 'try to conjure from the little pictures of Iowa and Colorado visions of what those distant places must be like. Before I was nine or ten I could identify all the states on the maps we were given in school.'
One summer day, his friend Ted Johnson, like Michener an orphan, astonished him by saying, 'Nothing doing in Doylestown. Why don’t we see what’s happening in New York?'
The impressionable, 14-year-old Michener liked the idea 'so off we started on the first important journey of my life.'
They began the 75-mile journey with less than 25 cents each and 'with not the slightest doubt in the world that we would make it.' And, indeed, they did make it 'without spending any of our capital' thanks to a truck driver who carried them on the ferry from New Jersey into the city.
At the back door of restaurants they found free food, and they saw 'with wide-eyed wonder sights we did not understand and whose historical importance we did not appreciate.'
After two 'wonderful' days, they headed home for 'a few boring weeks' before starting another trip, this time to Florida. Again they met with unfailing kindness and assistance, but in a small town in Georgia police intercepted the hitchhiking pair.
'What do you kids think you’re doing?' a policeman asked. Ted and James spent a night in jail before the policeman arranged a ride for them back to Philadelphia with a friend who was a truck driver.
The footloose youths made a third trip, this one to the Canadian border, before Michener began to travel alone. 'I was my own pilot, my own counselor, and was able to do pretty much as I wished,' Michener said. 'I was a free agent...I liked being off by myself and doing things in my independent way.
'I was in many ways the poorest boy on the road, in others the richest,' he wrote. 'I was always happy to be on the road meeting new people, hearing new stories and seeing new landscapes.'
Asked in later years why his elders allowed the trips or why he felt the need to leave home, Michener said it was not because of 'any deep-seated psychic deficiency.'
He explained, 'Home was not exciting enough to keep me tied to it, and I had no physical possessions of any kind to hold my interest for long periods of time. Yet I was not unhappy with my family, my school or my friends. The simple fact seems to have been that once I saw that mysterious road outside my house...I was determined to explore.'
Michener admitted that 'I was from the start an impressionable person, and I think I traveled in order to be changed from what I was so it all led to alteration. Whether for good or ill is not for me to judge. But I suppose those boyhood trips established my lifelong pattern of wanting to be free and of seeking new vistas, experiences and friendships.'
Michener often described himself as a 'foundling.' Sterling Watson of Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla., where Michener was a visiting professor in 1990, says, 'I believe he always lived and worked in the energy and the tragedy of that image and that idea. He was always on the move, always a stranger making friends.
'He relied on the people he met to give him things. He relied on their generosity. Mostly, they gave him their stories,' Watson continued. 'Unlike most writers, he was a good listener. He was infinitely interested in the lives of others, in their lineages and all the strains of culture and history that made them who they were. I believe this is at least partly because he knew so little of his own origins.'
So after Mabel Michener, a Quaker widow who rescued him shortly after his birth in 1907, introduced young James to books, libraries, music, opera and art, he became America’s favorite storyteller of the 20th century, the author of nine novels that reached the top of the New York Times best-seller chart.
'I write at 85 for the same reasons that impelled me to write at 45,' he said in 1992. 'I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess.
'The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.'
