November 13, 1997 | Read Time: 2 minutes
With the death of the novelist James Michener last month, Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania has lost a famous alumnus but gained a multimillion-dollar fortune.
Mr. Michener, who was poor as a boy, never forgot that the small liberal-arts college awarded him a full scholarship. Even as he went on to become a celebrated writer — he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for Tales of the South Pacific — and a rich man, he always seemed humbled by Swarthmore’s gesture.
So it was not surprising that his will named Swarthmore the main beneficiary of his estate.
That estate has been estimated to be worth $10-million, but could be much more valuable when the rights and royalties to Mr. Michener’s 43 books, such as Alaska, Hawaii, and Space, are included. An official estimate is expected to be announced by estate executors later this month.
Throughout his life, Mr. Michener, who died at the age of 90, had been very philanthropic, giving away $117-million, mostly to colleges, libraries, and museums — including $7.2-million to Swarthmore.
“The decent thing to do is get rid of some of this money,” Mr. Michener said in an interview (The Chronicle, January 9). “I have thought the measure of a human being is how he testifies in his life, and in his public life, to the things that he believes in.”
According to Mr. Michener’s will, a handful of people will get small bequests and Swarthmore will get the rest of his money. Mr. Michener had no children, and his wife died in 1994.
Potentially, the most valuable piece of the bequest to Swarthmore is not Mr. Michener’s savings, but the rights to and profits from his published and unpublished books, literary journals, and papers. They could mean an endless stream of income for the college, depending on the future profitability of his books.
“For him to do this at the end of his life,” says Tom Krattenmaker, a spokesman for Swarthmore, “is to us a very gratifying continuation of his support.”
In his will, Mr. Michener left it up to Swarthmore to decide how to spend his gift. The college, which raised $15.7-million in private support in its last fiscal year and has a $775-million endowment, has not yet decided what it will do with the income.
Mr. Michener also named the University of Northern Colorado — where he received a master’s degree and taught in the late 1930s and early 1940s — to be the official repository for his writings.
