The World Is My Home” is James A. Michener’s memoir of his remarkable life. It was passed on to me by someone who thought I might want to read about the author of best-selling books the size and weight of cinderblacks. He was wrong.

In fact, Michener lost me after Hawaii. His series of huge tomes — “Centennial,” “Space,” “Chesapeake,” “Texas,” et al. — sprawled too much for my taste. I thought he was at his best in compact early works like “Sayonara,” “The Bridges of Toko-Ri” and the one that made him famous, “Tales of the South Pacific.”

The only reason I began reading his memoir was because I knew Michener was a great enthusiast, as I am, for Ukiyo-e, the Japanese woodblock prints depicting the so-called floating world, the demimonde of Edo, analogous in some ways to Toulouse-Lautrec’s Montmartre. He also assembled one of the country’s most comprehensive collections.

In fact, he touched on this part of his life only in passing, but his discussion led me on to a fuller account in his own book from the fifties, “The Floating World.” It is predictably Michenerian in its comprehensiveness. One may fault the author for his plots or characterization, but never for the amplitude of his research.

“The Floating World” will teach the mere enthusiast more, perhaps, than he wants to know about the complex art form with its Kabuki actors, courtesans, erotica and, of course, the landscapes and cityscapes of Hokusai and Hiroshige. These last are the most popular in the West since they require less understanding of the intricacies of Japanese culture and history.

I stayed on to read the rest of the memoir not for Ukiyo-e or insights into the author’s fiction, but for Michener’s amazing life, a better story than any he ever told. An orphan adopted by his foster mother, an impoverished single Mother Hubbard who took in children for a few extra dollars but made them better people in the process. He was raised a Pennsylvania Quaker who acquired much of that sect’s characteristic decency, thrift, industry and pacifism.

Lacking even money for Christmas toys as a child, and required like all his siblings to lend a hand and take odd jobs to bring in a few extra dollars, he was given a gift of incalculable value when very young. It made his fortune. It was a library card and he read his way through his hometown library, aided by the local librarian who saw his hunger for learning was something special.

He read to such good purpose that he was able to matriculate at Swarthmore and work his way through that school and attend several graduate schools. He also won a traveling fellowship to Europe where he signed on as a merchant seaman to extend the trip and began a life spent prowling the globe.

For years Michener earned his living as a college teacher and then as a textbook editor before ever publishing his own work. He credits this experience with giving him a canny professional feel for what would sell. His thoughts on writing for money are as brisk and businesslike as those of Dr. Johnson and Trollope. He found what he could do that would please him and might please others and prospered mightily.

Like many of his generation, the trajectory of Michener’s life was altered by World War II. He became a middle-aged junior officer who was given a job as trouble-shooting eyes and ears for a theater commander. Throughout his life he seems to have fallen into good fortune, but it was clearly because he was eager, interested, willing to learn, lacking in vanity and scrupulously honest.

With a free pass to hop Navy planes through the South Pacific he reported back on incompetence, malfeasance and abuses of power. But he also fell in love with the people of Polynesia, treated his presence among them as a kind of informal course in cultural anthropology, and gathered the material that would make him famous,

A late bloomer, he did not publish until his forties, but that first book won an unexpected Pulitzer and, in a stage adaptation as “South Pacific,” became a gold mine. Two wonderful stories concern his sudden good fortune. “Tales of the South Pacific” was a series of stories drawn from life, more reportage than fiction, but it was given the fiction prize by the Pulitzer committee, who bent the rules. Michener says if it had appeared a year earlier or a year later it wouldn’t have had a chance, due to multiple strong contenders in 1946 and 1948.

When it appeared, because it was barely reviewed and by an unknown author, it sold few copies. Years later he learned that the committee had already picked a winner when Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the spitfire daughter of Teddy, told the head of the committee, a family friend, that she had just read a wonderful book that should get the prize. He gave it a look, told the other committee members to read it, and Michener was awarded the prize.

Since he was an unknown without an agent worth his salt, the deal with Rodgers and Hammerstein for the rights to the book was not generous to the author. To his great credit, when the previews suggested the show would be a hit, Hammerstein decided Michener had been slighted. It was too late to amend the contract, but he said he and Rodgers had agreed to let the writer buy a percentage participation in the show and earn a cut of the take.

Michener thanked him for his kindness, but said he didn’t have the money to invest. Hammerstein, bemused by the poverty of the author, loaned him the money, to be paid back when the profits came in. The worldwide hit freed Michener of money worries and allowed him to quit his editing job and begin writing full-time.

He lived modestly, researched and wrote continually, collected art, traveled widely and, being childless, gave most of his money away, almost always to benefit the arts. His collection of Japanese art went to Honolulu, other contemporary art — bought for next to nothing and worth millions thirty years later — went to The University of Texas. Royalties from seven of his mega-sellers allowed three different universities to fund writing programs and those from a fourth were dedicated to a fund to care for elderly, indigent authors. He also funded the conversion of his hometown’s abandoned jail, next door to the library where his journey began, into a museum.

In a long busy life he met despots and saints, presidents and business titans, delighted in the company of other globetrotters like Walter Cronkite and was thrilled to meet a personal hero, Stan Musial. Michener was not a great writer, but a hugely popular one.

He himself said the World War and subsequent prosperity gave Americans a hunger to know more about the world they lived in and about their own country. His books were designed to satisfy that desire. On the evidence of his memoir, he was a lovely man and an admirable example of the mid-20th Century American idealist, and an embodiment of the Quaker virtues.