Michener Center Director To Mold Its Namesake Into Fiction

James Magnuson, who has been the director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin since 1994, will bring some of his experience with boldface names to his next novel. The book, “Famous Writers I Have Known,” was recently acquired by the publishing house W. W. Norton & Company.

The best-selling author James Michener, whose philanthropy funded the center, is among Mr. Magnuson’s prominent inspirations, he said by email.

“The central figure in the book is modeled on Michener, who I knew for the last 10 years of his life,” Mr. Magnuson said. “In the novel, his name is Rex Schoeninger, the world’s oldest, richest writer, who is dying and all the buzzards are circling, looking for a shot at his last $20 million. That’s awfully close to the truth of what happened.” He called Michener a “complicated, admirable and sometimes heartbreaking figure.”

In the novel, writing classes at a prestigious Texas program are taught by a con man on the run who falsely adopts the identity of America’s most reclusive writer and sees Schoeninger as a potential mark.

“During those last years, I was so struck by the steady stream of people coming to [Michener] for money,” Mr. Magnuson said. “Some of them were con men, certainly, but much slicker and more cultured than my poor anti-hero off the streets of New York. Some of them were literary figures of note. I went along on some of those lunches and it was a true education. Some of those people were dazzling. Those experiences, fictionalized, are an important part of the novel.”

The book will be sprinkled with “bits about famous writers and their reputations,” according to Mr. Magnuson, but he considers real-life aspiring writers off-limits. “I love my students and have been careful not to base any of the characters in the book on them, though the descriptions of what goes on in workshops are only slightly exaggerated.”

Mr. Magnuson said the novel was autobiographical, but “not in ways that are immediately apparent. This novel was a way for me to pour everything I’ve learned about writers and writing into one book, to let it rip.”