Prolific author explored WWII’s lasting wounds
Herman Wouk, the prolific and immensely popular writer who explored the moral fallout of World War II in the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Caine Mutiny” and other widely read books that gave Americans a raw look at the horrors and consequences of war, has died at his Palm Springs home, where he wrote many of his acclaimed novels.
Wouk, who was honored by the Library of Congress in September 2008 with its first lifetime achievement award for fiction writing, died in his sleep Friday at the age of 103, his literary agent Amy Rennert told the Associated Press. Wouk was working on a book at the time of his death, Rennert said.
As a writer, Wouk considered his most “vaultingly ambitious” work the twin novels “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance,” about “the great catastrophe of our time,” World War II. Critics, however, considered “The Caine Mutiny” to be his finest work.
Taut and focused, the book is a riveting exploration of power, personal freedom and responsibility. “Caine” won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for literature and was on the New York Times’ best-seller list for more than two years, selling more than 5 million copies in the U.S. and Britain in the first few years after its publication.
In the novel, Wouk creates one of American literature’s most fascinating characters, Philip Francis Queeg, the captain of the U.S. destroyerminesweeper Caine, who is removed from his command by a lower-ranking officer during the middle of a typhoon.
Wouk came to view “Caine,” published in 1951, as an “anecdote” about the war, in which he served as a Navy lieutenant. But it was not, in his view, the “great war book” that he was determined to write.
Twenty years later, he published the first installment of what he thought was that book — “The Winds of War,” which was followed several years later by its sequel, “War and Remembrance.”
The novels, sweeping and epic in their ambition, followed career naval officer Victor “Pug” Henry and his family in the years building up to and during the war. “The Winds of War” takes events up to the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and America’s entry into the war. “War and Remembrance” (1978), which includes a harrowing account of the Holocaust, concludes shortly after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, marking the end of the war.
Wouk took great pains to recount real events and actual timelines and to incorporate the major figures of the time in their correct historical circumstances.
Herman Wouk was born May 27, 1915, in New York City, the child of immigrants from Minsk, Russia. Wouk’s father, who had arrived in New York City in 1905, began work as a $3-a-week laundry worker and eventually did so well in the laundry business that the family moved from the Bronx to the Upper West Side.
Wouk graduated with a degree in comparative literature and philosophy from Columbia University.
Wouk’s wife, Betty Sarah, died in 2011. He is survived by his two sons, Nathaniel and Joseph.