Herman Wouk, Pulitzer Prize-winning master of sweeping historical fiction, dies a 103
By Becky Krystal Becky Krystal Reporter covering topics related to food Email Bio Follow May 17 at 12:28 PM Herman Wouk, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Navy drama “The Caine Mutiny” whose sweeping novels about World War II, the Holocaust and the creation of Israel made him one of the most popular writers of his generation and helped revitalize the genre of historical fiction, died May 17 at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 103.
The pair of books established Mr. Wouk's legacy as a master of historical fiction, in which he blended the narrative power of fiction with great understanding and empathy for the human motivations behind wars and other historical events. The Economist magazine called “The Winds of War” “as serious a contribution to the literature of our time as ‘War and Peace' was to that of the nineteenth century.
Mr. Wouk said he found noncomformity for its own sake an all-too predictable theme in modern literature and had no interest in experimental or temporarily trendy prose styles. “I write a traditional novel, which is rather unfashionable, and I've taken a lot of kicking for it,” he once told The Post. “But the strength of my work comes from this intense grounding in the 18th- and 19th-century novelists.
“My life was broken at the time, as it was for all of our generation, by the coming of the war, and the winds of war swept a Bronx boy halfway around the world, below the equator, and he landed on an old destroyer minesweeper called the USS Zane,” Mr. Wouk told a National Press Club audience. “And that, I think, is where my adult education really began, because there, the hard shell of a New York wise guy cracked and fell off. The shallow conceit of a successful gag man faded away. . . .
The stage version of the courtroom scenes from “The Caine Mutiny,” called “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” proved a Broadway success in the 1950s with Henry Fonda and Lloyd Nolan and remained a staple of community theaters, with productions as far away as China. As a child, he told Time, he was the neighborhood fat boy forever being “clobbered” by street toughs. He found comfort in books that his mother bought from a traveling salesman when he was 12. In particular he grew to love the writing of Mark Twain for his ability to make people laugh, even at matters of faith.
Mr. Wouk returned to comedy later in his career, collaborating with singer Jimmy Buffett on a musical based on Mr. Wouk's 1965 novel “Don't Stop the Carnival,” about a harried New York publicist who flees to the fictitious Caribbean island of Amerigo to run a resort hotel. The show became a crowd favorite when it opened in 1997 in Miami's Coconut Grove Playhouse.
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