Despite his Quaker upbringing, he volunteered for service in the U.S. Navy in 1942, and his first assignment as a lieutenant (junior grade) was a wartime post as "a supersecretary for aviation maintenance" in the South Pacific--a region with which his name is still associated. From 1944 through 1946 Michener served as a Naval historian in the South Pacific.
Michener was able to visit some fifty islands during World War II, and as the war wound down, he retreated to a jungle shack and began writing the stories that were to appear as his first novel, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948.
Although Tales of the South Pacific is sometimes considered a collection of short stories and several chapters have been separately published in anthologies, Michener has always thought of it as a novel because of its strong theme and largely unified setting; several characters recur throughout the book, and the chapters are united through the characters' participation in a single cause--the giant anti-Japanese operation called "Alligator." The beauties and terrors of the South Seas form the background for the actions of members of almost every section of the American armed forces in the Pacific war--army, navy, air force, doctors and nurses, Construction Battalion workers, and radio operators.
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