Author hatched several bestsellers
Wrote with authenticity, great precision
NEW YORK• Herman Wouk, whose taut shipboard drama The Caine Mutiny lifted him to the top of the bestseller lists, where he remained for most of a career that extended past his 100th year thanks to page- turners like Marjorie Morningstar, Youngblood Hawke and Second World War epics The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, died early Friday at his home in Palm Springs, California. He was 103.
Wouk (pronounced woke) enthralled millions of readers in search of a good story, snappy dialogue and stirring events, rendered with a documentarian’s sense of authenticity and detail.
“I’ ve been absolutely dead earnest, and I’ve told the story I had in hand as best as I possibly could,” he told an interviewer in the 1970s. “I have never sought an audience. It may be that I am not a very involved or a very beautiful or a very anything writer, but I’ve done the level best I can.”
Wouk was born May 27, 1915, in the Bronx, to Abraham and Esther Levine Wouk. He enlisted in the Navy immediately after Pearl Harbor, entered midshipman’s school and was posted as a radio officer to the USS Zane, a destroyer- minesweeper operating in the South Pacific.
He told The New York Post in 1956 that his time in the Navy had been the greatest experience of his life.
With The Caine Mutiny, Wouk struck gold. A crackling drama on the high seas leading up to a riveting courtroom scene, with Capt. Philip F. Queeg, a blend of paranoia and incompetence. When he steers the ship toward certain disaster in a typhoon, his junior officers remove him from command, an act for which they later face court-martial.
The book, which sold more than three million copies in the United States alone, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1952 and was made into a movie in 1954 with Humphrey Bogart as Queeg.
In 2015, Wouk published a memoir, Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year- old Author. He said that such a project had first been suggested to him in the 1980s, but that his wife had discouraged it, saying, “You’re not that interesting a person.”
Wouk’s wife, the former Betty Brown, who represented him after founding the BSW Literary Agency in 1979, died in 2011. There was no immediate information on his survivors.
On the question of his reputation, Wouk took a philosophical line.
“In the long run, justice is done,” he told Writer’s Digest in 1966. “In the short run, geniuses, minor writers and mountebanks alike take their chance. Imaginative writing is a wonderful way of life, and no man who can live by it should ask for more.”