Writing
Experts have described The Caine Mutiny as one of the best depictions of daily life aboard a US ship during the Second World War.
His novels after The Caine Mutiny include Marjorie Morningstar (1955), Youngblood Hawke (1962), and Don't Stop the Carnival (1965). In 1956 he published in paperback the novel Slattery's Hurricane, which he had written in 1948 as the basis for the screenplay for the film of the same name. Wouk's first work of non-fiction was 1959's This is My God, an explanation of Orthodox Judaism.
In the 1970s, Wouk published his two most ambitious novels, The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978). He described the latter, which included a devastating depiction of the Holocaust, as "the main tale I have to tell." Both were made into hugely popular TV miniseries. Although they were made several years apart, both were directed by Dan Curtis and both starred Robert Mitchum as Captain Victor "Pug" Henry, the main character.
The novels are historical fiction. Henry Kissinger described them at one point as "the war itself." Each has three layers: the story told from the viewpoint of Captain Henry; a more or less straightforward historical account of the events of the war, and an analysis by a member of Hitler's military staff, the insightful fictional General Armin von Roon.
Wouk devoted "thirteen years of extraordinary research and long, arduous composition" to these two novels. "The seriousness with which Wouk has dealt with the war can be seen in the prodigious amount of research, reading, travel and conferring with experts, the evidence for which is to be found in the uncatalogued boxes at Columbia University."
Read more about this topic: Herman Wouk
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
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“In the course of writing one historical book or another, it has happened that I could hardly restrain myself from simply copying entire documents. Indeed, I sometimes sank down among the documents and said to myself, I can’t improve on these.”
—Alfred Döblin (1878–1957)