Photo courtesy of Theodore Brauner, 1951, National Photo Collection of Israel. Courtesy of Wikipedia
Wouk is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author whose novels include The Caine Mutiny (1951), Marjorie Morningstar (1955), The Winds of War (1971), and War and Remembrance (1978). His plays include The Traitor (1949), The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1954) and Nature’s Way (1957). He also published nonfiction, including This is My God: The Jewish Way of Life (1959), The Will to Live On (2000), The Language God Talks (2010), and Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year Old Author (2015).
His work was successfully adapted for the stage, film and television. The 1954 Broadway production of his play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial was directed by Charles Laughton and starred Henry Fonda. Films based on his work include Slattery’s Hurricane (1949) starring Richard Widmark, Marjorie Morningstar (1955), starring Natalie Wood and Gene Kelly, and The Caine Mutiny (1954), starring Humphrey Bogart and José Ferrer. Wouk also wrote the screenplay for the seven-episode miniseries The Winds of War (1983) and the twelve-part miniseries War and Remembrance(1988-89), winner of an Emmy, and both starring Robert Mitchum and Polly Bergen.
In 1995, the Library of Congress hosted a symposium honoring Wouk’s work. The Library of Congress honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award for the Writing of Fiction in 2008. Other honors include the Columbia University Medal for Excellence, a Jewish Book Council Lifetime Literary Achievement Award, and the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Born in the Bronx to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Wouk served in the U.S. Naval Reserves in WWII. He lived in DC from 1964 through the 1970s, where he researched and wrote The Winds of War and War and Remembrance.