Herman Wouk
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction stands among the most closely watched honors in American letters, and Herman Wouk was among those who received it — recognition tied to his novel The Caine Mutiny, one of several works that defined his long career as a writer.
Born on May 27, 1915, in The Bronx, Wouk was educated at Townsend Harris High School, then at Yeshiva University, and later at Columbia University. A citizen of the United States who worked in English, he occupied several roles across his writing life: novelist, screenwriter, diarist, and science fiction writer. The range of those designations suggests a working writer who moved between forms rather than settling into a single mode. The Caine Mutiny was one of the novels he produced, and it earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He also wrote The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, two further novels that added to his body of work in fiction.
The honors that came to him were not limited to the Pulitzer. He received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and the Library of Congress also designated him a Living Legend — an acknowledgment from one of the country's central cultural institutions. Taken together, these recognitions trace a career that drew sustained attention from both literary and public bodies over many years. Wouk died on May 17, 2019, in Palm Springs, a few days before what would have been his one hundred and fourth birthday.
The Library of Congress Living Legend designation, granted to a writer who had worked across novels, screenplays, diaries, and science fiction, offers a concrete endpoint for measuring how his output was received. It is a specific institutional verdict, and it stands as the last in a series of formal acknowledgments that extended across decades of his working life.
Quotes by Herman Wouk
In our own tradition, and on the basis of the words of Hebrew Scripture, there is not the faintest doubt that Moses is not only the source of Judaism under God, but its high reach as well.
Phil’s a slow-thinking sort, so I usually tied him up. He’s one of the few communists I’ve ever been able to stand. They’re like the abolitionists. Their cause may be just, but their personalities are repulsive. I don’t really know whether they’re right or not, and I don’t care.
To sum up: whatever fictional liberties have been taken in weaving the phantoms of my invention through real events, The Hope is presented to my readers as an honest account of Israel’s early history, as true and responsible as research could make it. As to whether the tale itself pleases, only they can judge.
Lenin, another jailbird, was the great originator. He made it all up, Leslie, you realize – the Jesuitical secret party, the coarse slogans for the masses and the contempt for their intelligence and memory, the fanatic language, the strident dogmas, the Moslem religiosity in politics, the crude pageantry, the total cynicism of tactics, it’s all Leninism. Hitler is a Leninist, Mussolini is a Leninist. The talk of anti-communism and pro-communism is for fools and children.
Seventeen days before the end of the war, the minesweeper Caine finally swept a mine.
22 Emily’s Letters After the Suez fiasco, Great Britain and France were no longer serious players in the Middle East, and Israel was tarred as their co-conspirator in a failed last gasp of imperialism.
Marjorie, my sweet, we’ve fallen in love with each other, that’s all. You love me. I love you. Don’t lose any sleep over it.” Electric stings ran through her arms and legs. She put.
South Wind had been, in Marjorie’s visions, a new clear world, a world where a grimy Bronx childhood and a fumbling Hunter adolescence were forgotten dreams, a world where she could at last find herself and be herself – clean, fresh, alone, untrammelled by parents. In a word, it had been the world of Marjorie Morningstar.