James A. Michener

James A. Michener was an American writer who wrote more than 40 books, most of them long fictional family sagas set in particular places and built on detailed history. He was known for the meticulous research behind them, and his first book, Tales of the South Pacific, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Titles such as Hawaii, Centennial, Chesapeake, Caribbean, The Source and Texas follow the same pattern, tracing generations of families across a region's past. He died in 1997.