Michener wrote many huge books which blend fiction and historical events. He wrote Tales of the South Pacific, Hawaii, Texas, Mexico and many other books. He has an odd style that narrates like a history book and yet includes fictional characters [or fictionalized accounts of things that happened in history]. It's quite fun to visit and revisit without having to have a sole story that finishes in one normal sized book. It's a departure from the norm of our narrative form today.
Forrest has a very Joycean vibe, a type of Pound cantos effect to his style--he's sometimes spoken of as the black Joyce. His skill is quite incredible. He speeds along like a better version of the New Orleans favorite A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy [1980]. He's got a great style and incredible phrasing, it's often very poetic and cuts you to the quick.
Glance through some pages of his The Bloodworth Orphans here, and try his There is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden here. Here's an excerpt from his big magnum opus Divine Days:
[...]
Now the body of McNabb, once dead to life, was actually doing a kind of vamped upwards dance, touched by an electricalvoltage through some unseen conductor. And I became troubled, then horrified (not whether the death of McNabb would bring on the loss of my Aunt's liquor license) but that the unconscious wrath of McNabb's body would bring down the whole flooring, flora, fauna, tropicalplants, chairs, walls, bottles of liquor from the shelves. It reminded me of attending scores of wrestling matches as a kid, and noticing these body-slamming wrestlers banging bodies down upon that same mat, week in and week out, and thinking surely one of them is going to drive his foe through the mat-that is, until I woke up to the fact that matches were set up fakes. But this was real, what McNabb was doing to my Aunt's floor.
[...]
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