Although many standard reference works state that Michener was born in New York City on 3 February 1907, son of Edwin and Mabel Haddock Michener, they are in error. Mabel Michener picked up the young child from the streets of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and reared him as her foster child. In 1931, when the young man received a scholarship to study abroad, he obtained a passport only after Mabel Michener and a notary prepared a statement giving him citizenship status. The fact that Michener has never known when or where he was born, or his family background, has impelled him to invent his roots and enabled him to put himself in the place of characters of exotic heritages.
James Albert Michener grew up in the Bucks County countryside in Pennsylvania and attended Doylestown Grammar School. At the age of fourteen he hitchhiked for some months through forty-five American states. On his return home he delivered newspapers, wrote a sports column for the local paper, and was saved from delinquency by his prowess in sports, especially basketball. A sports scholarship took him to Swarthmore College, and his second novel evokes feelings of an undergraduate of the time in this Quaker institution.
