"The Caine Mutiny" was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years, has sold millions of copies and is still in print.īorn in New York to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Wouk grew up in the New York borough of the Bronx and graduated at 19 from Columbia University. It featured the paranoid, incompetent, ball-bearing-rattling Captain Queeg, who was later memorably portrayed in the movie version by Humphrey Bogart, and won Wouk a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Wouk was a show-business joke writer before the 1951 novel "The Caine Mutiny," his third book, put him in the literary big time. "If they're reading, then I've done what I set out to do," Wouk said of his audience in a 2000 Washington Post interview. In addition to his war tales, Wouk's books included a comic novel ("Don't Stop the Carnival"), a "Jewish-American princess" novel ("Marjorie Morningstar"), a novel about the publishing business ("Youngblood Hawke") and theological musings as an Orthodox Jew ("This Is My God," "The Will to Live On"). Some critics dismissed Wouk as a middlebrow writer but his books - many of them bestsellers with a focus on moral dilemmas - showed a broad range. He continued to write, even after stating that "Sailor and Fiddler" would be his last book, and was working on his next book up until a month ago, Rennert said.
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