Herman Wouk

Herman Wouk (born May 27, 1915) is a bestselling American author with a number of notable novels to his credit, including The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance.

Herman Wouk was born in New York City into a Jewish family that had emigrated from Russia. After a childhood and adolescence in the Bronx and a high school diploma from Townsend Harris High School, he earned an B.A. from Columbia University in 1934, where he studied under philosopher Irwin Edman. Soon thereafter, he became a radio scriptwriter, working in David Freedman's "Joke Factory" and later with Fred Allen and in 1941, for the United States government, writing radio spots to sell war bonds. He lived a fairly secular lifestyle in his early 20s before deciding to return to a more traditional Jewish way of life, modeled after his grandfather, in his mid-20s. From that day to the present, Wouk has commenced each day of his life with a reading of Scripture in Hebrew.

Wouk joined the United States Navy and served in the Pacific Theater, an experience he later characterized as educational; "I learned about machinery, I learned how men behaved under pressure, and I learned about Americans." Wouk served as an officer aboard two destroyer minesweepers (DMS), the USS Zane and USS Southard, becoming executive officer of the latter. He started writing his first novel, Aurora Dawn, during off-duty hours aboard ship. Wouk sent a copy of the opening chapters to Irwin Edman who quoted a few pages verbatim to a New York editor. The result was a publisher's contract sent to Wouk's ship, then off the coast of Okinawa. The novel was published in 1947 and became a Book of the Month Club main selection. His second novel, City Boy, proved to be a commercial disappointment at the time of its initial publication in 1948; perhaps, as Wouk once claimed, it was swept away by the excitement over Norman Mailer's bestselling World War II novel The Naked and the Dead.

While writing his next novel Wouk read each chapter as it was completed to his wife, who remarked at one point that if they didn't like this one, he'd better take up another line of work (a line he would give to the character of the editor Jeannie Fry in his 1962 novel Youngblood Hawke). The novel, The Caine Mutiny (1951), would win the Pulitzer Prize. A huge best-seller drawing from his wartime experiences aboard minesweepers during World War II, The Caine Mutiny was adapted by the author into a Broadway play called The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, and was later made into a film, with Humphrey Bogart portraying Lt. Commander Philip Francis Queeg, captain of the fictional DMS Caine. Some Navy personnel complained at the time that Wouk had taken every twitch of every commanding officer in the Navy and put them all into one character, but Captain Queeg has endured as one of the great characters in American fiction.

He married Betty Sarah Brown in 1945, with whom he had three sons, becoming a fulltime writer in 1946 to support his growing family. His first-born son, Abraham Isaac Wouk, died in a tragic accident as a child; Wouk later dedicated War and Remembrance (1978) to him with the Biblical words, "He will destroy death forever." His novels after The Caine Mutiny include Marjorie Morningstar (1955), Youngblood Hawke (1962), and Don't Stop the Carnival (1965). Wouk's first work of non-fiction was 1959's This is My God, a defense/explanation of Orthodox Judaism. In the 1970s, Wouk published his two most ambitious novels, The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978). He described the latter, which included a devastating depiction of the Holocaust, as "the main tale I have to tell."

Wouk hired highly-qualified young historians to assist him with the research for his later historical novels, and their details are highly accurate. Experts have described The Caine Mutiny as one of the best depictions of daily life aboard a US ship during the Second World War.

In 1998, Wouk received the Guardian of Zion Award. He and his wife currently live in Palm Springs, CA.

Wouk on Zionism

"Zionism is a single long action of lifesaving, of snatching great masses of people out of the path of sure extinction." (This is My God, first edition (1959), page 264.)

Selected works

The Man in the Trench Coat (1941)
Aurora Dawn (1947)
The Lomokome Papers (1947) (see [1])
City Boy: The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder (1948)
The Traitor (1949 play)
The Caine Mutiny (1951)
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1953 play)
Marjorie Morningstar (1955)
Slattery's Hurricane (1956)
Nature's Way (1957 play)
This is My God: The Jewish Way of Life (1959, revised ed. 1973) (non-fiction)
Youngblood Hawke (1961)
Don't Stop the Carnival (1965)
The Lomokome Papers (1968)
The Winds of War (1971)
War and Remembrance (1978)
Inside, Outside (1985)
The Hope (1993)
The Glory (1994)
The Will to Live on: The Resurgence of Jewish Heritage (2000)
A Hole In Texas (2004)