On May 17, American novelist Herman Wouk died, just ten days before he was due to turn 104. If Ernest Hemingway's life and career had been as long as those of Herman Wouk, he'd have been alive as recently as 2003 and he'd have published a book in 1999. Had John Steinbeck lived and worked as long as Wouk, he'd have seen the re-election of George W. Bush and have published a book around the same time as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Had Charles Dickens lived as long as Wouk, he'd have witnessed the arrival of World War I. Had Arthur Conan Doyle lived as long, he might've heard the Beatles first single, “Love Me Do,” on the radio in his final days. Rudyard Kipling would have been able to purchase a copy of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Wouk not only outlived all of his Lost Generation heroes (notably Thomas Wolfe and Hemingway), but also all of his literary contemporaries of the Greatest Generation (Malmud, Welty, Salinger, Bellow, Mailer, Cheever, Vonnegut, Vidal, Heller). What's more, he outlived most of the best writers of the Silent Generation (Updike, Roth, Ken Kesey), numerous baby boomer writers (Laurie Colwin, Sam Shepard, David Foster Wallace), and even some Gen X authors (Samuel Park) and Millennials (Marina Keegen). No author as important and productive as Herman Wouk has ever lived as long as he did.
The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Herman Wouk grew up in New York City between the world wars. He fought with distinction in history's greatest manmade cataclysm and lived to write about it better than almost anyone else who ever tackled the subject. In the 1960s he managed a hotel in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He lived in Mexico for a while and lost a young son there in a drowning accident. He lived in Washington, D.C., while researching the two big War novels. He also spent a large part of his life in California.
The Caine Mutiny (1951) was one of the seminal novels of the 1950s. It kicked off a vogue for serious, literary courtroom dramas and helped pave the way for later titles such as James Gould Cozzens's By Love Possessed, Robert Traver's Anatomy of a Murder, Meyer Levin's Compulsion, and even Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. Jack Kerouac also wrote one of the seminal novels of the 1950s, but he has been dead and gone for 50 years despite having been born seven years after Wouk. Marjorie Morningstar, a tale about the perils of young womanhood in America, was the bestselling novel of 1955 and has never gone out of print. Grace Metalious, whose Peyton Place, a bestselling novel about the perils of young womanhood in America, was published the following year, was born nearly a decade after Wouk and has been dead for more than 55 years.
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