ABSTRACT
He served in the USN during WW2 in the Pacific in the destroyer-minesweepers USS Zane and USS Southard, in which he was Executive Officer. In 1952 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Caine Mutiny, a story set in the same type of ship in which he served. The book was made into a theatre production The Caine Mutiny Court Martial in 1953 and a film in 1954. The Winds of War appeared in 1971 and was set in the years leading to WW2; War and Remembrance appeared in 1978, and its story involves the war itself. The former work was adapted as a network television series in 1983 and the latter in 1986. Wouk’s works reached millions of people, illuminating the moral dilemmas involved with war, as well as the sacrifices of the ordinary people who answer the call to defend their country in war. Of his Navy experience, he wrote: ‘I learned how men behaved under pressure, and I learned about Americans’. During his career he wrote more than a dozen major books and a number of film and stage scripts. He is a 1934 graduate of Columbia University.
