Career Military career įollowing the attack on Pearl Harbor, Wouk joined the U.S. Soon thereafter, he became a radio dramatist, working in David Freedman's "Joke Factory" and later with Fred Allen for five years and then, in 1941, for the United States government, writing radio spots to sell war bonds. He also served as editor of the university's humor magazine, Jester, and wrote two of its annual Varsity Shows. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at the age of 19 from Columbia University in 1934, where he was a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. Īfter his childhood and adolescence in the Bronx, he graduated from the original Townsend Harris High School in Manhattan, Townsend Harris Hall Prep School, which was the elite prep school for City College.
He would later say that his grandfather and the United States Navy were the two most important influences on his life. Judaism would become integral to both his personal life and his career. After a brief period as a young adult during which he lived a secular life, he returned to religious practice. Wouk was frustrated by the amount of time he was expected to study the Talmud, but his father told him, "if I were on my deathbed, and I had breath to say one more thing to you, I would say 'Study the Talmud.'" Eventually Wouk took this advice to heart. When Wouk was 13, his maternal grandfather, Mendel Leib Levine, came from Minsk to live with them and took charge of his grandson's Jewish education.
His father toiled for many years to raise the family out of poverty before opening a successful laundry service. Wouk was born in the Bronx, the second of three children born to Esther (née Levine) and Abraham Isaac Wouk, Russian Jewish immigrants from what is today Belarus. Historians, novelists, publishers, and critics who gathered at the Library of Congress in 1995 to mark Wouk's 80th birthday described him as an American Tolstoy. The Washington Post called Wouk, who cherished his privacy, "the reclusive dean of American historical novelists". His books have been translated into 27 languages. His other major works include The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, historical novels about World War II, and non-fiction such as This Is My God, an explanation of Judaism from a Modern Orthodox perspective, written for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. Herman Wouk ( / w oʊ k/ WOHK – May 17, 2019) was an American author best known for historical fiction such as The Caine Mutiny (1951) for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
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