He returned from the war determined to lead a different sort of life "because of the intensity of that experience," he said. It also provided material for "The Caine Mutiny" and spurred him to explain the conflict in personal and historical terms. That experience stripped away what Wouk once called "the hard shell of a New York wise guy" whose ambition had been to write Broadway farces. A stint as a joke writer for radio comedian Fred Allen was followed by wartime service in the South Pacific as an officer aboard destroyer-minesweepers. "The Caine Mutiny" was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years, has sold millions of copies and is still in print.īorn in New York to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Wouk grew up in the New York borough of the Bronx and graduated at 19 from Columbia University.
It featured the paranoid, incompetent, ball-bearing-rattling Captain Queeg, who was later memorably portrayed in the movie version by Humphrey Bogart, and won Wouk a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Wouk was a show-business joke writer before the 1951 novel "The Caine Mutiny," his third book, put him in the literary big time. "If they're reading, then I've done what I set out to do," Wouk said of his audience in a 2000 Washington Post interview. In addition to his war tales, Wouk's books included a comic novel ("Don't Stop the Carnival"), a "Jewish-American princess" novel ("Marjorie Morningstar"), a novel about the publishing business ("Youngblood Hawke") and theological musings as an Orthodox Jew ("This Is My God," "The Will to Live On"). Some critics dismissed Wouk as a middlebrow writer but his books - many of them bestsellers with a focus on moral dilemmas - showed a broad range. "Wouk is a matchless storyteller with a gift for characterization, an ear for convincing dialogue, and a masterful grasp of what was at stake in World War II.He continued to write, even after stating that "Sailor and Fiddler" would be his last book, and was working on his next book up until a month ago, Rennert said. "The depth of the detail Wouk brought to bear on his subjects was impressive" - Financial Times A panoramic, engrossing story." - Atlantic Monthly "First-rate storytelling." - New York Times Like no other books about the war, Wouk's spellbinding narrative captures the tide of global events - the drama, the romance, the heroism and the tragedy of World War II - as it immerses us in the lives of a single American family drawn into the very centre of the maelstrom. Herman Wouk's sweeping epic of World War II, which begins with THE WINDS OF WAR and continues in WAR AND REMEMBRANCE, stands as the crowning achievement of one of America's most celebrated storytellers.
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