Herman Wouk

• Born: May 27, 1915
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: May 17, 2019
• Place of death: Palm Springs, California

Novelist and playwright

Wouk wrote several popular novels chronicling America’s experience in World War II. He also wrote fiction and nonfiction about the Jewish American experience and the founding of the state of Israel, sparking controversy within the Jewish American community.

Area of achievement: Literature

Early Life

Herman Wouk was born in New York City in 1915, the eldest son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Wouk’s father was highly successful in the laundry business and thus able to provide respectably for his family. Wouk was a distinguished student at the prestigious Townsend Harris High and at Columbia College, where he studied comparative literature and philosophy. After receiving his bachelor’s degree, Wouk got a job as a writer for radio comedians, earning a good living during a time when most Americans were suffering in the Great Depression. During those years, Wouk drifted away from Orthodox practices, returning to them only gradually over the next decade.

In 1941, Wouk went to work in Washington, DC, for the defense bond campaign, and after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor he secured a commission in the Navy. He saw service in the Pacific aboard destroyer-minesweepers, and during the long lulls between action he began writing a novel. When the war ended, he was discharged and returned to New York; in 1945, he married Betty Sarah Brown, whom he had met while on active duty. The couple eventually had three sons; sadly, his eldest son drowned in 1951.

Life’s Work

In 1947, Wouk published his first novel, Aurora Dawn, a novel about the advertising industry. This Book-of-the-Month club selection launched his career as a writer. His second novel, The City Boy (1948), was the first on a theme that would occupy his attention for six decades: the Jewish American experience. He was not to be pigeonholed as simply a Jewish American writer, however. His play, The Traitor (1949), which enjoyed a brief run on Broadway, dealt with the dangers of communism. His third novel,The Caine Mutiny (1951), the story of young reservist Willie Keith’s encounter with the paranoid martinet commander, Philip Queeg, demonstrated that Wouk could tell a story masterfully and revealed that another of his lifelong interests was the American military and its role in the larger society. The novel became a runaway best seller and earned for Wouk the Pulitzer Prize. A film based on the book, with Humphrey Bogart in the role of Queeg, was a box-office success. A play derived from the novel ran for more than four hundred performances on Broadway in 1954. While the novel was well received by the general reading public, some critics complained that its ending seemed to excuse Queeg for his behavior because he had devoted his life to the naval service.

Flush with the success of The Caine Mutiny, Wouk began work on Marjorie Morningstar (1955). The novel follows the adventures of Marjorie Morgenstern, a Jewish girl who falls for a ne’er-do-well lapsed Jew at a summer camp in upstate New York, develops aspirations to become a stage star, but eventually comes to her senses and returns to her Orthodox roots. The novel exposed an entire generation to the lives of Jewish American families and provided meaningful insights into the problems and benefits of assimilation into mainstream American society. Nevertheless, Wouk came under attack from more liberal Jewish writers for oversimplifying Jewish American life.

Three years later Wouk moved to the Virgin Islands, where he completed Youngblood Hawke (1962), a tragedy of lost opportunities based on the life of the writer Thomas Wolfe. He also began Don’t Stop the Carnival (1965) before moving once again, this time to Washington, DC. Neither of these novels was well received by critics, although Youngblood Hawke sold well. In the nation’s capital Wouk began research for what would become his magnum opus, a two-volume fictional account of World War II. The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978) bring together two of his central interests. In these novels Wouk tells the story of a Navy family whose lives are changed and ultimately defined by the war; he also manages to weave in an account of the experiences of the European Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

After writing screenplays for two television miniseries based on these novels, Wouk turned once again to his Jewish heritage for materials from which to fashion his next three novels: Inside Outside (1985), an account of a Jew serving as an adviser to President Richard Nixon during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war; and The Hope (1993) and The Glory (1994), a pair of novels describing the founding of the state of Israel. Eventually Wouk moved to Palm Springs, California. Though most people go there to retire, Wouk remained active at his craft. In 2004, he published A Hole in Texas, a story about a physicist engaged in particle research—a notable departure from most of the work he had written earlier in his career.

Wouk achieved a certain degree of notoriety for his writings on Orthodox Judaism. His 1959 volume, This Is My God, revised in 1973, provides a personal account of the religion that he felt was the shaping force in his life. In 2000, he published a companion piece, The Will to Live On, in which he tackles some of the larger problems that Jews faced in America and throughout the world, especially those arising from the founding of the state of Israel. As with his fiction, these books were not well received by everyone in the Jewish community. Several critics found them to be distortions that overly favored Orthodox Judaism over other forms of Jewish worship. In 2010, he published a third nonfiction work centering on the concept of religion. In this book, The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion, he considers his faith in the context of modern science.

Unlike most best-selling authors of the twentieth century, Wouk did not participate in the celebrity culture that was open to writers of popular fiction. Occasionally, however, he did make public appearances and accept honors, including one from his alma mater, Columbia University, which recognized his contributions to literature in 1980 with the award of the prestigious Alexander Hamilton Medal. Notably, in 2008, Wouk became the first recipient of the Library of Congress Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Writing of Fiction.

After writing and publishing the epistolary novel The Lawgiver in 2012, in which he focuses on the story of the biblical Moses by following a consultant (Wouk as a character) asked to sign off on an attempted Hollywood production of the story, he published his last book, a memoir titled Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author, in 2016. He died at his home in Palm Springs on May 17, 2019, at the age of 103.

Significance

Wouk attracted a large reading audience among the American public, making his books on World War II and the Jewish American experience highly influential in shaping opinions on both topics. At the same time, his strident conservatism in politics and in theology made him the target of attacks by some liberal historians and by Jewish writers who criticized him for misrepresenting Judaism as being constricting and rule-bound. Despite these rebukes, Wouk held fast to his ideals and served as a strong voice for orthodoxy, promoting old-fashioned patriotism and a strong devotion to traditional Jewish religious practices.

Bibliography

Beichman, Arnold. The Novelist as Social Historian. Edison, N.J.: Transaction, 2004. Update of an earlier study on Wouk’s social vision, stressing his strong moral sense, his focus on plotting, and his inclusion of characters with positive values.

Grimes, William. "Herman Wouk, Best-Selling Novelist with a Realist's Touch, Dies at 103." The New York Times, 17 May 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/obituaries/herman-wouk-dead.html. Accessed 23 Sept. 2020.

Mart, Michelle. “Acceptance and Assimilation: Jews in 1950’s American Popular Culture.” In Forging Modern Jewish Identities: Public Faces and Private Struggles, edited by Michael Berkowitz, Susan Tananbaum, and Sam Bloom. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003. Examines Wouk’s treatment of problems of assimilation in Marjorie Morningstar, comparing his efforts with those of a number of his contemporaries.

Mazzeno, Laurence W. Herman Wouk. New York: Twayne, 1994. Survey of Wouk’s career through 1990, outlining his contributions to American war literature and his role as a Jewish American writer; pays special attention to the critical reception his books received.

Shapiro, Edward S. “The Jew as Patriot: Herman Wouk and American Jewish Identity.” In We Are Many: Reflections on American Jewish History and Identity. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2005. Provides a literary analysis of Jewish characters in Wouk’s fiction and discusses his influence in shaping Americans’ perception of Jewish Americans.