Herman Wouk, a consummate writer until the end, dies at 103

NEW YORK — Herman Wouk was a prizewinning, million-selling author never quite in fashion.

He was a religious Jew among secular peers, a respecter of authority in a field of rebels. He didn't brag like Norman Mailer and was spared the demons driving the madness of Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint." After a Pulitzer early in his career for "The Caine Mutiny," he was mostly ignored by awards committees and was often excluded from anthologies of Jewish literature. Gore Vidal praised him, faintly, by observing that Wouk's "competence is most impressive and his professionalism awe-inspiring in a world of lazy writers and Tv-stunned readers."

But Wouk, who died Friday 10 days shy of his 104th birthday, was a success in ways that resonated with critics and readers, and with himself. He created at least one immortal fictional character, the unstable Captain Queeg of "The Caine Mutiny." He was praised for the uncanniness of his historical detail in "The Winds of War" and other books. He was among the first modern Jewish writers who appealed to the general public and had an enviably large readership that stayed with him through several long novels, many of which dramatized the conflicts between faith and assimilation.

He was working on a book until the end, said his literary agent Amy Rennert.

Wouk's long, unpredictable career included gag writing, fiction and a musical co-written with Jimmy Buffett. His twopart World War II epic, "The Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance," was adapted by Wouk himself for a 1983, Emmy Award-winning TV miniseries starring Robert Mitchum. "The Winds of War" received some of the highest ratings in history and Wouk's involvement covered everything from the script to commercial sponsors.

Heads of state read him and quoted from him, but Wouk shied from talk of greatness, telling one reporter he was not a "high stylist." In "War and Remembrance," a writer notes in his journal, "I could contribute nothing new; but writing as I do with a light hand, I might charm a few readers into pausing, in their heedless hurry after pleasure and money, for a look at the things that matter."

From Ernest Hemingway to James Joyce, major authors of the 20th century were assumed either anti-religious or at least highly skeptical. But Wouk was part of a smaller group that included C.S. Lewis, Chaim Potok and Flannery O'connor, those who openly maintained traditional beliefs. He contended that among writers, anti-conformity was a kind of conformity. "It seems curious," he wrote in "Aurora Dawn," his first novel, "that life 'as it really is,' according to modern inspiration, contains a surprising amount of fornication, violence, vulgarity, unpleasant individuals, blasphemy, hatred, and ladies' underclothes."