James Michener was a big man in more ways than the one for which he was famous.

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Michener had an amazing knack for combining narrative with well-researched history that made his books both entertaining and educational.

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But Mr Michener brought a believable version of other people's history to many American readers who were not by inclination curious about foreign parts.

ECONOMIST: James Michener

"The chances an armed teacher will hit a child are high, " Dean Michener, of the New Hampshire School Boards Association, told lawmakers earlier this year.

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An orphan who never knew who his real parents were, he was brought up in Pennsylvania by Mabel Michener, a poor Quaker widow, who was given his date of birth as February 3rd, 1907.

ECONOMIST: James Michener

Michener was no seat-warmer on the Board.

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Bartlett Sher, who oversaw the show, thanked Rodgers, and Hammerstein, along with original director Joshua Logan and James Michener, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific, the collection of short stories which inspired the production.

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For someone in his early twenties to have graduated summa cum laude from Amherst, to have been given a Michener grant, and to have published, one year out of Iowa City, an unremittingly bleak villanelle in the T.

NEWYORKER: Great Experiment

Although we agreed on little regarding domestic politics -- he was an unabashed Democrat -- Michener was a delight to work with on our shared cause of sustaining and increasing a free flow of information into the Soviet empire and its satellites, overcoming the U.S.S.R.s efforts to thwart us with intense jamming and other obstacles.

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