The Inspiration for South Pacific
“I’m going to live the rest of my life as if I were a great man… I’m going to concentrate on the biggest ideals and ideas I can handle.”
James A. Michener
James Michener
February 3, 1907 – October 16, 1997
Tales of the South Pacific is a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of sequentially related short stories by James A. Michener about the Pacific campaign in World War II. The stories are based on observations and anecdotes he collected while stationed as a lieutenant commander in the US Navy on the island of Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides Islands (now known as Vanuatu).
Written in 1946 and published in 1947, the book was loosely adapted in 1949 as the Broadway musical South Pacific and subsequently as two films, released in 1958 and 2001.
“No one could have been more surprised than I… Nor could anyone have been more pleased, for if I held no great brief for the stories as art, I was indelibly convinced that they could never be challenged as a truthful and sometimes probing analysis of men lost in a strange world.”
James A. Michener about winning a Pulitzer Prize for Tales of the South Pacific - South Pacific Companion, pg. 110
“I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific. The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and in inner lagoons, lovely beyond description…
The timeless, repetitive waiting.”
Tales of the South Pacific, first paragraph, pg. 1 - James A. Michener