Excerpts from obituary published in San Diego Union-Tribune on 5/18/2019:
A MASTER OF HISTORICAL FICTION
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 World War II epics “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance,” died in his sleep on May 17, 2019 at his home in Palm Springs, California. He was 103.
Wouk 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, helping to revitalize the historical fiction genre. “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 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. He enlisted in the Navy immediately after Pearl Harbor, entered mid-shipman’s school and was posted as a radio officer to the USS Zane, a destroyer-minesweeper operating in the South Pacific. He later served aboard the USS Southard where he became the Executive Officer. He told The New York Times in 1956 that his time in the Navy had been the greatest experience of his life. “In the Navy, I found out more than I ever had about people and about the United States,” he said. With “The Caine Mutiny,” 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 E. 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 United States alone, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1962 and was made into a movie in 1964 with Humphrey Bogart as Queeg. In 2015, Wouk published what he said was his last book, a memoir, “Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-old Author.” He said that such a project had first been suggested 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. He has been buried at Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, New York.
Submitted by CDR Roy A. Mosteller, USNR (Ret)
