Readers of JNZL will have noted the news of Michael King's tragic death in March of this year with special sadness. Michael had been on the Editorial Board of this journal since its inception in 1983. Roger Robinson, JNZL's instigator, recalls inviting the then Writing Fellow of Victoria University to join the Board partly out of esteem for his writing, and partly out of a desire to give JNZL currency outside the universities.Michael was a passionate communicator whose explicit goal for his own work was that it should reach ordinary people. This he achieved with unprecedented success. As a historian, a biographer and a social commentator, no other New Zealand writer had such a following amongst the wide group of people he thought of as 'curious and intelligent general readers. His last book, the Penguin History of New Zealand, sold out its initial print run of 10,000 copies in six days. At the time of his death, sales had already reached over 50,000; another reprint and a hardback version will take the run to 70,000.Michael grew up in Paremata near Wellington and attended school at St Patrick's College, Silverstream. He often spoke of the influence of his history teachers Spiro Zavos, who fostered his interest in literature, history, current affairs and politics at school, and Peter Munz, who became his mentor at Victoria University where he gained his BA. Michael then moved to Hamilton, where he completed an MA in History and English at the University of Waikato, and joined the staff of the Waikato Times. The Maori Affairs round to which he was assigned brought him into close contact with Tainui, and their power base at Turangawaewae. The friendships he formed, and his knowledge of tikanga Maori, sustained his academic and professional writing throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. His ethno-biography of Te Puea Herangi, the guiding spirit of Turangawaewae, earned him his Waikato DPhil in 1978; Moko: Maori Tattooing in the 20th Century (1972) and biographies of Te Puea (1977) and Whina Cooper (1983) gave many Pakeha their first glimpse of a culture which until then had been largely invisible. His commitment to extending Pakeha awareness of Maoritanga also underpinned the ground-breaking television documentary series Tangata Whenua (1974), researched, written and presented by Michael and directed by Barry Barclay, which brought a vital sense of traditional and contemporary Maori society into Pakeha living rooms.Partly in response to mounting criticism that Pakeha historians had no mandate to represent Maori, Michael next turned his attention to the other side of New Zealand's ethnic equation. In Being Pakeha (1985), Pakeha: The Quest for Identity in New Zealand (1991) and Being Pakeha Now (1999) he meditated on his own ethnicity, on the formative dynamic between Maori and Pakeha, and on questions of Pakeha identity. At the same time, his interest in cultural history led him towards literary biography. He explained this development at a talk given at the International Festival of the Arts in Wellington in 2000:I could see plainly the peculiar advantages, for the biographer, of literary biography. Writers were often morally and ethically and intellectually more adventurous than most of their contemporaries and literary biography, it seemed to me, offered more real and more substantial possibilities for exploring the vasty depths of the human psyche than the lives of non-literary subjects.Frank Sargeson: A Life appeared in 1995. Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame (2000) won the Montana Medal for nonfiction, the Readers' Choice Award and the Booksellers' Choice Award at the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and crowned his career as a biographer. …