Herman Wouk

Before he was a reclusive yet celebrated American author, Herman Wouk was a Jewish kid growing up in the Bronx during the Great Depression. He was a bright student, attending Columbia University in his teens in the 1930s. Following graduation, he used his writing skills for comedy and advertising before joining the US Navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II. Wouk served from 1942 to 1946, during which he started writing Aurora Dawn, which would become his first published novel in 1947. While his debut was well received, his follow-up, City Boy wasn't, which served as a good example for Wouk's career, which was no doubt successful but critically divisive. His next work, the Pulitzer Prize winner The Caine Mutiny was his most well known, especially after it was adapted for a Humphrey Bogart-starring film. For the next two decades, Wouk bounced between comedic stories such as Don't Stop the Carnival in 1965 and war-inspired epics like 1971's The Winds of War and its 1978 follow-up War and Remembrance. As Wouk started to get up in age, his pace of publishing started to slow down, though he never stopped. He dove into his Jewish heritage with the pair of 1990s novels The Hope and The Glory. As he crept up towards the age of 100, he released The Lawgiver, a humorous epistolary book about a fictional movie and followed that up with the 2016 memoir Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author. At the age of 103 in 2019, Wouk passed away in his sleep. He was reportedly working on another novel.