With his non-fiction works, Michaelis also co-wrote John Aristotle Phillips's biography and wrote about male friendship.
[2] For his post-secondary education, Michaelis attended Princeton University and lived with John Aristotle Phillips.
[6] In 1977, Michaelis and Phillips wrote about "their experiences with the atomic bomb and growing up in the 70s" with a book scheduled to be released as Falling Upward the following year.
[7] With Mushroom: The Story of the A-Bomb Kid, their 1978 book was about Phillips and the atomic bomb blueprint he created while at Princeton.
[8] While reviewing the book for The Central New Jersey Home News, Lawrence Ausubel believed that fictional newspapers were included in Mushroom.
[23] In her review of the book, Gail Collins of The New York Times said it was "the first major single-volume biography [of Eleanor Roosevelt] in more than half a century".
[26][27] Apart from literature, Michaelis worked for the New York City Police Department as a volunteer during the early 1980s.
[1] He had been consulted as part of the November 2007 television special titled "Good Ol' Charles Schulz" for American Masters.
[21] Details that were included in the Roosevelt biography by Michaelis were "topography, wardrobe, weather conditions and societal moods".
[35] In 2024, Michaelis and his wife, Nancy Steiner, testified in connection with a lawsuit brought against political candidate and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. over Kennedy's fraudulent claim of New York State residency in campaign filings with the New York State Board of Elections.
Michaelis and Steiner's Westchester home was cited by Kennedy, a one-time friend, as one of two residences he had claimed to maintain in the state in recent years.