ABSTRACT
A critical yet sympathetic and admiring reader (and in my special case, a careful rereader) comes to a simple conclusion: Wouk gets better and better as he ages. His technical virtuosity keeps pace with his creativity and artistic ambition. His will to swim against the tide of modern novelistic convention, as con-cretized by Ulysses, the novel to end novels, grows stronger. Like that of Samuel Richardson, whom he so admires, Wouk's aim is not only to entertain but also, as a novelist involved with society, to fix basic moral issues upon the collective conscience of free men.
