Michener's secret covenant

This year is the centennial of the birth of writer James Michener, whose sprawling, multigenerational novels, like "Hawaii," "The Source," and "Chesapeake," used to plant themselves atop bestseller lists for months at a time. Michener, like his contemporary Leon Uris, was a beaverish, readable hack, although few remember that he won a Pulitzer Prize for his wonderful first book, "Tales of the South Pacific."

The Michener centennial is a big deal in Hawaii, Texas, and Colorado, the settings for three of his novels, and in his native state of Pennsylvania. Just last week Random House republished "Centennial," which sold an astonishing 5.8 million copies when it came out in 1974.

Locally, a South African writer named Errol Lincoln Uys (pronounced "ace") is celebrating in a special way. He has just released a torrent of documents on his website, erroluys.com, documenting his uncredited co authorship of one of Michener's best-selling books, 1980's "The Covenant." It is worth the trip to visit the "Working With James A. Michener" part of the site. If nothing else, you will get a feel for the thousand s of pages of plot notes, drafts, and critiques that go into making a 1,300-page novel about the creation of South Africa.

In his mid-30s, Uys worked at Michener's side for two years, as an employee of Reader's Digest, which had put the two men together. Uys had shown a Digest editor his outline for an African novel; the editor suggested he collaborate with Michener, who was eager to produce one of his trademark page-turners on a hot, topical subject like South Africa. Like Michener aides before and after him, Uys produced hundreds of pages of historical and sociological research . But he also wrote dozens of pages of copy that Michener simply retyped and submitted as his own work. He provides four examples of this copying in the "Manuscript" section of the website.

"Like other writers, Michener relied on huge research teams," Uys says. "But I don't think anybody else wrote sections of his books. I had this grand delusion that he would acknowledge me as the co author of the book." But no. Michener did acknowledge co authors on two of his nonfiction books. With the novels, he almost always tipped his hat to his researchers -- as he did to Uys in "Covenant" -- but he never shared the byline.

Michener died in 1997, and left no children to defend his legacy. The head of the Colorado-based James A. Michener Library didn't return my call. Stephen May , author of the 2005 biography "Michener: A Writer's Journey," devotes a chapter to the writing of "The Covenant" and concludes, "Michener committed a scarlet literary crime and used his celebrated status in publishing to get away with it." Barbara Helly , author of a 2001 University of Rennes PhD on "The Covenant," writes, "One could call Michener's sole paternity of 'The Covenant' a falsification, but it is a falsification that the whole book industry participates in."

Uys, now 63, lives in an attractive clapboard house not far from Codman Square, and evinces no particular rancor toward Michener. Although his agent suggested he litigate, Uys says it never entered his mind; "I didn't want to be known as the writer who sued James Michener." Uys has since written his own bestseller, "Brazil," for which Michener provided a lengthy blurb.

And during Uys's lean years in the 1980s, Michener loaned him $20,000, in installments, that kept the younger writer and his family afloat. Michener didn't expect to be repaid, nor was he. So, overall, let's call the debt even, and move on to the next thing.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.