Herman Wouk

Herman Wouk was born in New York City in 1915 and studied at Columbia University. He began his professional life writing for radio comedy, but the Second World War changed the direction of his career. Wouk served as an officer in the United States Navy in the Pacific, and his experience aboard minesweepers later supplied the institutional knowledge and emotional tensions behind his naval fiction.

The Caine Mutiny, published in 1951, examines authority, fear and responsibility aboard a troubled warship and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Wouk later produced the large connected novels The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, which follow the Henry family through diplomacy, naval operations, the Holocaust and the global expansion of the conflict. His work frequently combines public history with marriage, faith and family loyalty, allowing vast events to be experienced through continuing personal relationships. Wouk also wrote novels and nonfiction concerned with Jewish identity and religious practice. He died in 2019 at the age of 103, leaving one of the most ambitious fictional treatments of the Second World War written by an American participant.