Herman Wouk

Herman Wouk was an American author and screenwriter.

Wouk began his professional career as a joke writer in the 1930s, eventually joining the staff of radio comedian Fred Allen.

He worked on radio shows promoting purchases of war bonds before enlisting in the Navy in 1942. His experience as a Navy lieutenant helped inspire Wouk’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Caine Mutiny, which was later adapted into a Broadway play starring Henry Fonda and Lloyd Nolan, and a film which starred Humphrey Bogart.

Wouk's 1955 novel, Marjorie Morningstar, became a movie three years later that starred Natalie Wood as a middle-class Jewish girl living in the Bronx in the 1930s who wants to be an actress.

He also wrote The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, two historical novels about World War II that were published in 1971 and 1978, respectively, and made into 1983 and 1988 ABC miniseries, both of which starred Robert Mitchum.

Wouk's final book was Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author, published in January 2016.

Wouk died May 17, 2019, in Palm Springs, California. He was 103.