Credit: Courtesy NYPL Digital gallery, New York Public Library
James Michener was forty years old when his first book, Tales of the South Pacific, was published in 1947. A collection of sequential short stories based on his experiences as a lieutenant commander in the US Navy in the New Hebrides Islands during World War II, Tales of the South Pacific won a Pulitzer prize in 1948. In 1949, Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein adapted Michener’s book into the smash Broadway musical “South Pacific.”
