In 1974, the Hawaiʻi Literary Arts Council presented him an Award for Literature, saying he "brought life to fact and reality to fiction." Molokaʻi (1975) tells the story of leprosy patients quarantined at Kalaupapa Kaʻaʻawa (1972) describes life on Oʻahu in the 1850s, during the great smallpox epidemic when many native Hawaiians were dying of newly introduced diseases and Stone of Kannon (1979) and its sequel Water of Kane tell about the first Japanese contract laborers who arrived in 1868.
Later novels dealt with other aspects of Hawaiʻi's history and he encouraged and inspired many other local writers to tell their own stories. Married to Elizabeth Jane Krauskopf in 1943, he had two sons, Andrew and Philip and a daughter, Mahealani.īushnell's first novel, The Return of Lono, won the Atlantic Monthly's fiction award in 1956, at a time when most books about Hawaiʻi were written by outsiders. He served as editor in chief of the journal Pacific Science from 1957 through 1967. Following the war he taught at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, retiring in 1970 as emeritus professor of medical microbiology and medical history. He returned to Hawai`i in 1940 working for the Department of Health on Kaua`i and Maui before joining the U.S Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor. By 1937 he had earned both his MS and PhD degrees in bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin and later worked and taught (1937–40) at George Washington University Medical School in Washington D.C. He graduated in 1934 from the University of Hawaii, where he served as student body president. As a youngster he developed a love for the cultures of Hawai`i as well as literature and classical music. His friends and classmates in the area were Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Hawaiian, and "hapa-haole", so he grew up "local," mastering Hawaiian "pidgin" as well as English as his novels attest. Descended from contract laborers from Portugal and Norway and a mechanic from Italy, he was born in the working-class neighborhood of Kakaʻako. (Oswald Andrew) "Ozzy" Bushnell ( - 21 August 2002) was a microbiologist, historian, novelist, and professor at the University of Hawaiʻi.
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