Best-selling author won Pulitzer for ‘The Caine Mutiny’
Herman Wouk, whose taut shipboard drama “The Caine Mutiny” lifted him to the top of the best-seller 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 the World War II epics “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance,” died early Friday at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 103.
His death, just 10 days before his 104th birthday, was confirmed by his literary agent, Amy Rennert. She said he had been working on another book when he died, the subject of which he had not yet told her.
A whipping boy for reviewers who at best grudgingly acknowledged his narrative skill, Mr. 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.
The critics could be brutal. “He can compete with the worst of television because he is the worst of television, without the commercials,” Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote in 1966, describing Mr. Wouk’s readers as “yahoos who hate culture and the mind.”
His place in the literary universe was difficult to pinpoint. Did he belong with the irredeemably middlebrow James Gould Cozzens and Thomas B. Costain, or popular but respectable writers like John P. Marquand and James Michener?
“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 for the New York Public Library 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.”
His first novel, “Aurora Dawn,” was published in 1947. When “The Lawgiver,” his comic novel about the making of a film dealing with the prophet Moses, was published in 2012, his career was well into its seventh decade and he was approaching the century mark.
Mr. Wouk immediately began writing his next book. “What am I going to do?” he said in an interview with The Times in November 2012. “Sit around and wait a year?”
In 2016, the year he turned 100, Mr. Wouk published what he said was his last book: a memoir, “Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100Year-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.”
Herman Wouk was born on May 27, 1915, in the Bronx. He attended Columbia University, where he majored in comparative literature and philosophy and studied with Irwin Edman, a philosopher whose conservative skepticism temporarily led him away from the Orthodox Judaism in which he was raised and that later became a mainstay of his personal life and the subject of a best-selling nonfiction book, “This Is My God” (1959), and a follow-up, “The Language God Talks” (2010).
Through a classmate, he found work after graduation as an apprentice radio gag writer. The job, to his dismay, entailed cataloging old comedy routines and cleaning up salty vaudeville jokes for reuse. In 1936, he became a staff writer for the radio comedian Fred Allen.
Mr. Wouk enlisted in the Navy immediately after Pearl Harbor, entered midshipman’s school and was posted as a radio officer to the U.S.S. Zane, a destroyer -minesweeper operating in the South Pacific.
He told an interviewer for The New York Post in 1956 that his time in the Navy had been the greatest experience of his life. “I had known two worlds, the wiseguys of Broadway and the wiseguys of Columbia — two small worlds that sometimes take themselves for the whole world,” he said. “In the Navy I found out more than I ever had about people and about the United States.”
While aboard ship he read “Don Quixote,” a book that turned his ambitions from the stage to novel writing. He sent four chapters of “Aurora Dawn,” a satire about radio admen, to Mr. Edman, his college professor, who placed it with Simon & Schuster. Published in 1947, the book sold reasonably well despite tepid reviews, as did his semi-autobiographical novel “The City Boy” (1948).
With “The Caine Mutiny,” Mr. Wouk struck gold. A crackling drama on the high seas leading up to a riveting courtroom scene, it introduced readers to the unforgettable Capt. Philip F. Queeg, a seething blend of paranoia and incompetence, constantly fiddling anxiously with two steel ball bearings in his left hand. 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 3 million copies in the U.S., won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1952 and was made into a movie in 1954 with Humphrey Bogart as Queeg.
In “Marjorie Morningstar,” published in 1955, Mr. Wouk returned to civilian life. His heroine, a middle-class Jewish girl who dreams of becoming an actress, changes her name from Morgenstern to Morningstar, falls in love with and loses her virginity to a pretentious would-be playwright, and learns to settle, happily, for life as a wife and mother in suburban Westchester. “You couldn’t write a play about her that would run a week, or a novel that would sell a thousand copies,” an old beau remarks after visiting her in middle age.
For Mr. Wouk, this was the point. “My novel is a story of young love, a picture of the manners and attitudes of courtship in the United States nowadays,” he wrote in The American Weekly, noting, without criticism, that his heroine’s fate, like that of nearly all American girls, was to lead “a conventional, anonymous existence.” The novel inspired the 1958 film of the same name, starring Natalie Wood and Gene Kelly.
Mr. Wouk delivered another blockbuster with “Youngblood Hawke” (1962), which chronicled the creative torments of a writer loosely based on Thomas Wolfe.
He wrote two war novels: “The Winds of War” (1971), which covered the period from the signing of the NaziSoviet pact in 1939 to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and “War and Remembrance” (1978), which carried the story forward through the great military campaigns of the war. Both novels were translated into successful television miniseries starring Robert Mitchum.