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Pulitzer Prize-winning author Herman Wouk has died. Wouk was famous for his sprawling World War II novels, including 

, and for his portrayal of Jewish Americans in the novel 

. He died in his sleep Friday at his home in Palm Springs, Calif., at age 103.
Many people might remember Wouk for a certain incident involving strawberries in 

, which became a film in 1954. After having a breakdown at sea, the tyrannical Captain Queeg accuses his crew of stealing a quart of strawberries and becomes obsessed with finding the culprit.


Humphrey Bogart played Queeg in the film, but he wasn't exactly what Wouk had in mind when he wrote the character. In the book, Wouk described the captain as "a small man" with "strands of sandy hair across an almost bald head." In 2004, the author told NPR, "Now Captain Queeg is Humphrey Bogart. There's nothing you can do about it, and I'm perfectly content with [it.] That was one of the great performances, I think, of his career."

 was Wouk's most celebrated book, but he had a substantial career both before and after it. He got his start in writing years earlier, in comedy. For five years starting in 1936, Wouk wrote jokes and sketches for the popular radio host Fred Allen. But after Pearl Harbor, the 26-year-old enlisted in the Navy and served in the Pacific. In his off hours, Wouk began to write 

, a novel that got mixed reviews. His second book, 

 put him on the map. It won a Pulitzer Prize, it was a bestseller and it became a play and a movie.
Wouk told NPR, "When I finished 

 I wrote in my work journal ... 'Unless I'm mistaken, this is a good book. But it's not yet the war novel I mean to write.' "
In fact, it was the first in a run of ambitious books that included 

, each about a thousand pages long. And war wasn't Wouk's only subject. He wrote about the publishing world, a fictional Caribbean island and the founding of Israel. And in 

, he tapped into his own heritage as a New York-born child of Jewish immigrants to tell the story of a young girl trying to break into show business.

"He really was the Jackie Robinson of Jewish American fiction," says Jonathan Karp, president and publisher of Simon & Schuster and editor of Wouk's last book, 

, and he popularized a lot of themes that other writers — like [Saul] Bellow and [Philip] Roth and [Bernard] Malamud — would deal with in their novels."


Karp says that one of the reasons Wouk appealed to readers for so many years was the variety in his novels. "He really did not want to write the same novel twice. The writers he admired were the greats — they were the Victorian novelists, they were writers like [Thomas] Hardy. He wanted to write big novels about complicated lives and the cultures in which they took place."



Despite his popularity with readers, Wouk didn't always get a good critical response. 

 long and "mildly interesting" with an "indifference to quality" and a "reliance on clichés."
According to Karp, many of the critics missed the point. "One of the reasons why he didn't get the kind of stellar reviews that writers like Saul Bellow got was because he was accessible." And Wouk did express serious ideas in his fiction. In one section of 

 the writer to tell these stories. "I think he aimed high and had large ambitions for reaching a lot of readers — and he entertained millions of them." And with all of his major works still in print, chances are that in the years to come, Herman Wouk will entertain millions more.  Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Arts and Culture

The Thread® - Books and Literary News

Rose Friedman

Author

Wouk was famous for writing "The Winds of War," "Marjorie Morningstar" and "The Caine Mutiny," which won a Pulitzer Prize. He also helped popularize themes that writers like Philip Roth later tackled.

Herman Wouk, 'The Jackie Robinson of Jewish-American fiction,' dies at 103

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