In Michener’s current blockbuster, which moves at an unhurried pace through 15,000 years of South African history, the reader’s task is eased by archeological reports, genealogical charts, and a glossary of Afrikaans words “without which the narrative would lack verisimilitude.” In his “Jewish” novel, The Source (1965), he takes a present-day archeological dig in the western Galilee as his point of departure, and inundates the reader with centuries of reenacted Jewish, Christian, and Muslim history, plus maps, population tables, and scientific drawings of objects unearthed from the ancient mound. Saturated in information and local color, Michener’s novels overflow with an instructive abundance of scrupulously vetted dates, customs, and statistics. Though he enlivens and simplifies the dusty record of the past by means of invented characters, incidents, and dialogue, and has a canny respect for the allure of romance and melodrama, his plots are braced with a solid rigging of expert knowledge about the history, archeology, religion, language, geology, wildlife, agriculture, and specialized social and economic lore of the particular region-Afghanistan or Colorado, Israel or South Africa-that he stakes out for exploration and proceeds to conquer. Michener’s panoramic chronicles are a very different breed of fiction from the classic schlock-by the likes of Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robbins, or Stephen King-that ordinarily hogs the best-seller list, for Michener’s novels are short on sex and long on facts. 1 Why do they zoom to first place on the best-seller list the moment they appear, and stay there, immovable as Fort Knox, for month after gold-bearing month? What does this popularity tell us about the vagaries of popular taste and culture? Precisely because James Michener is one of the most phenomenally popular writers in America today, it is a challenge to account for the enormous appeal of historical tomes like Centennial, The Source, Chesapeake, Hawaii, and his latest, The Covenant.

None of this has made a particle of difference to his readers: as the New York Times recently reported, with understandable awe, his books have sold twenty million copies and earned eight million dollars. James Michener’s long and earnest novels, which can come to well over 800 pages, have not been found worthy of even the most casual mention in serious studies of contemporary American fiction, and neither do they appear on college-literature reading lists.

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