SOURCE: "Epic Novelist James Michener Is Dead at 90," in The Washington Post, October 17, 1997, p. A01.

[In the following obituary, Barnes gives an overview of the author's works, calling him a "gifted storyteller, with a panoramic vision."]

James A. Michener, a prolific author whose best-selling works ranged from poignant and compassionate stories of men and women in love and war to weighty novels spanning centuries and millennia while combining fiction and historical fact, died yesterday of kidney failure at his home in Austin. He was 90.

Michener was 40 before he wrote his first book, Tales of the South Pacific, but it made an immediate and lasting impact. It won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for literature and became the basis for the hit musical South Pacific, by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. The show, starring Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza, ran on Broadway for more than five years beginning in 1949, and...