Two books from small presses take a look back at a giant of popular literature. One need not be a fan of the much-published Michener's huge historical novels or travel tales to enjoy Grobel's wide-ranging romp through Michener's strong opinions on writers and writing, American education, politics, women's and gay rights, and race matters. Grobel first interviewed Michener 20 years ago and revised recent interviews only months before Michener died in 1996 at age 90. Michener, a Quaker who wrote his first book while a Navy lieutenant in the South Pacific, once earned a living as a teacher and as an editor at now-defunct Macmillan before Rogers and Hammerstein's music made him famous. Michener was a self-proclaimed "women's libber," in touch with his feminine side from an early age, who declared writers an "aberrant" bunch. He was most influenced by Wharton, Dostoevsky, Dreiser, and Joyce Carol Oates, and suggested that racial politics govern even the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature. Michener's political and economic advice sometimes seems dubious, but readers will relish his insights into writing and writers. Silverman, a close friend of Michener's for half a century, purports to share "intimate, personal times" the two had and includes some of their letters. They met in 1947 at a gathering of "liberal" World War II veterans, and Silverman admits he had neither heard of nor read Michener's work at the time. Silverman says Michener "rarely talked about his work, but . . . never really stopped working." Silverman delves into Michener's liberal political causes (including an unsuccessful run for Congress on the Democratic ticket in 1962), his three marriages (the third, a "mixed" union with a Japanese woman at a time when feelings against such marriages ran high), and his prodigious philanthropies, though he was "personally frugal." A story of friendship with warts and all, Silverman reveals the complicated personality of a driven writer who also managed personal success with his friends, wives, students, and millions of readers. --Dale Edwyna Smith