James A. Michener: Early Life

James Albert Michener was born on February 3^rd, 1907 to unknown parents and was taken in by Mabel Michener, a Doylestown, Pennsylvania woman who worked as a caretaker for orphaned children.  Though never legally adopted by Mabel Michener, James Michener remained in her care for his entire life.  Some, including Michener himself, speculate that he was the illegitimate son of Mabel and a prominent Doylestown citizen. 

Michener’s unusual upbringing created a lifelong mark.  Mabel was poor and cared for up to a dozen children at a time.  For Michener, this meant he had few material possessions and was leniently supervised.  Though he faced great hardship during his childhood, he was also afforded great freedom to explore the world on his own at a young age.  As a child he hitchhiked, exploring much of the US before he graduated high school.  

Michener’s childhood was marked by his love of literature, music, and art.  He was an avid reader, captivated by the tales of adventure in Honore de Balzac’s novels (May 2005).  He was also enamored with music and attended performances by John Phillip Sousa and Victor Herbert, who performed at the amusement park where Michener worked during high school (Hayes, 1984).  He was an avid collector of art cards, keeping a collection of the inexpensive small-scale reproductions of major works in a shoebox (May, 2005).  In his 1992 memoir, The World is My Home, he reflected:

 My life at home in Doylestown could be rather bleak, for I had none of the clothes and games and equipment that boys my age would normally have had.  All I really had was that music, the art I remember so well, and the endless books from the library.

James Michener approached school with the same zeal he had for the arts.  He was a diligent student, star basketball player, editor of the school newspaper, and class president.  He earned a full scholarship to Swarthmore College where he studied English, history, and philosophy.

Upon graduating from Swarthmore in 1929, Michener accepted a teaching position at the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.  His tenure there was quite brief, however, and, in 1930, Michener was selected for the Joshua Lippincott Fellowship an endowment from Swarthmore that allowed him to travel and study abroad in Scotland.  During the height of the Great Depression, many thought it foolish of Michener to leave a steady job, but Michener could not resist the urge to see the world (Michener, 1992).

Based at University of Saint Andrews, Michener explored Scotland with great wonder, hiking across the hills, traversing the coastline, and exploring its remote islands.  Though there seems to be little record of the work Michener completed, his love of travel was apparent.  In 1932, Michener enlisted as an honorary seaman in the British merchant marines, traveling through the Mediterranean (May, 2005).  His time in Spain instilled in him a life-long appreciation for Spanish art and culture, which would later inspire his book Iberia.

In 1933, when his fellowship ended, Michener returned to the United States to teach at the George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania.  He started in the English department, but disheartened by the "awful drudgery of teaching grammar," lobbied to move to the history department the following year (Hayes, 1984). That summer, in preparation for this switch, Michener studied at the University of Virginia Charlottesville where he met and quickly became enamored with Patti Coon, a student from South Carolina.  The two were married that summer, and she joined him in Newtown.  In spring of 1935, the Micheners moved to Colorado, where James had accepted a position as an associate professor of Social Studies at the Colorado State College of Education (now the University of Northern Colorado).