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| World of James A. Michener -007aa- James A. Michener Books - Fiction: Tales of the South Pacific @ Wikipedia |
| Tales of the South Pacific Hardback 1st edition cover Author(s) James A. Michener Country United States Language English Genre(s) Short stories Publisher Macmillan, New York (1st edition) Publication date January 28, 1947 Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Tales of the South Pacific is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, which is a collection of sequentially related short stories about World War II, written by James A. Michener in 1946 and published in 1947. The stories were 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). |
| Book The stories take place in the environs of the Coral Sea and the Solomon Islands. Michener as narrator gives a first-person voice to several of the stories as an unnamed "Commander", performing duties similar to those he performed himself in World War II. The stories are interconnected by recurring characters and several loose plot lines. One plot line in particular is the preparations for and execution of a fictitious amphibious invasion, code-named "Alligator". The focus of the stories is, however, the interactions between Americans and a variety of colonial, immigrant, and indigenous characters. The chronology of the stories begins with the building of an airfield on Norfolk Island before the Battle of the Coral Sea in 1942, and goes through the early 1944 invasion of one of Michener's fictional islands. Although the stories are primarily about the U.S. Navy, most of the action is shore-based, and none concerns ships larger than an LCI. |
| Musical adaptation: South Pacific The highly successful musical play South Pacific by Rodgers and Hammerstein, which opened on Broadway on April 7, 1949, was based on the stories in Tales of the South Pacific. In particular, the stories used were "Fo' Dollah", about Bloody Mary, Liat, and Lieutenant Cable; and "Our Heroine", about Nellie Forbush and Emile de Becque. Characters from the stories were merged and simplified to serve the format of the musical. For example, while the coastwatcher in the musical was portrayed as an American Marine (Lt. Cable) assisted by an expatriate French plantation owner (Emile de Becque), in the original story ("The Remittance Man"), the coastwatcher was an English expatriate assisted by native islanders. This coastwatcher in the original short story is a disembodied voice on a short-wave radio, and is never seen by the other characters in the story until his head is found impaled on a stake by a search-and-rescue party. The character of Emile de Becque in the short story has eight mixed-race illegitimate daughters by four different women, none of whom he married, when he meets the nurse Ensign Nellie Forbush. In the musical, he has two legitimate mixed-race children by a woman whom he had married and who had died. |
| Other uses American television producer Bob Mann wanted Michener to co-create a weekly television anthology series from Tales of the South Pacific, with Michener as narrator. Rogers and Hammerstein, however, owned all dramatic rights to the novel and did not give up ownership.[1] Michener did lend his name to a different and unrelated television series, Adventures in Paradise, in 1959.[2] |
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