It Was 50 Years Ago Today: ‘The Source’ by James A. Michener
September 8, 1965
The Source by James A. Michener
#1 on the New York Times Best Seller List (Fiction), July 11, 1965 – May 7, 1966
Every generation has its middlebrow celebrity authors: the kind who become favorites of the Book-of-the-Month Club, but maintain only a middling critical reputation; who sell tons of books, but strive for an air of importance through deeper themes and broader historical scopes. Few of these writers transcend their era or are taught in schools (unless you count Charles Dickens), but they’re often a valuable insight into what the common, educated reader of a particular era sought from literature.
For decades, the writer who epitomized this sort of serious yet populist niche was James A. Michener, known for his lengthy sagas spanning thousands of years and dozens of characters. Michener debuted with 1947’s relatively low-key short story collection Tales of the South Pacific, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and was adapted into the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific the following year. Other successes followed, including 1953’s The Bridges at Toko-Ri, but it would be the generation-spanning epic Hawaii, published in 1959, that would provide the template for the Michener Novel.
Like Hawaii, Michener’s 1965 bestseller The Source takes as its central focus not a character, but a place, spending roughly 1000 pages delving into lives of people who dwelled there from prehistory to the present day. The Source’s frame story concerns a 1964 archaeological dig at the fictional site of Makor in Israel. Each chapter flashes back to a particular historical era associated with one of artifacts uncovered in the dig, from a sickle used by the earliest farmers (approximately 10,000 BCE), to a bullet fired during the struggle for Israeli independence (1948 CE). It’s often a cliche to refer to the setting as as one of the characters in a story, but in Michener’s case, it’s often true — especially considering how thinly developed his actual characters are.
One of the most distinctive things about Michener’s novels, apart from their hefty size, is the obvious amount of research that went into each one, and the richness of detail that emerges as a result. For example, while most readers may have a rough idea of what the Spanish Inquisition entailed, Michener vividly depicts the anti-semitic paranoia of the era, and the torture that a suspected Jew would be subjected to, more viscerally than a simple history textbook. At worst, the level of detail can seem as though Michener tried to cram in everything in his research folder into the book; at best, it creates a lived-in, believable world, albeit one inhabited by mostly unbelievable characters.
The Source’s characters are less fully developed people than avatars for whichever historical event or contemporary idea Michener wants to include in the book. One of the advantages of writing a novel rather than a non-fiction history, it would seem, would be to give a glimpse into the personal impact of historical events and circumstances, but The Source features precious little insight into human thought or behavior. At times, this one-dimensionality even borders on offensive. For example, the present-day character Vered Bar-El is an accomplished ceramics expert, but Michener is really only interested in her as the fulcrum of a romantic rivalry between three men on the site. Vered is never shown as having a say in which man she chooses (Michener takes it for granted that she must choose one of them), nor does the book ever delve deeply into her inner life — though, to be fair, this is par for the course for most of the characters in The Source, male or female.
Michener’s fans overlooked the thinness of the characters in favor of the depth of the book’s scope, making The Source the #1 novel in the United States for a staggering 10 months straight. The Source sold more copies than any other book in 1965, making it the first of four of Michener’s books to become the bestsellers of their respective years. The profound success of the book, along with that of Leon Uris’s Exodus, published a decade earlier, helped cement American sympathy for the still-new state of Israel. The Source may not be the most insightful book on the religious and historical struggles in the Middle East, but it performed a valuable role in giving the average American reader a peek into another worldview, and raising theological questions that they may not have otherwise considered.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
